After chatting with a friend who also does DevOps, I revisited the Cloudflare dashboard to take another look at what’s included in the free tier.
I’ve been using and recommending free Cloudflare accounts for years, primarily for domain and DNS management. This time, I was surprised by how much has been added since my last close look. Cloudflare has quietly transformed its free tier into a comprehensive package that would otherwise require several different tools for small businesses or dev teams.
The full list is so long that walking through all of it would read like a spec sheet, not a blog post. Instead, here are the services I’ve used recently, what they’re good for, and where the free tier’s limits are important to know before relying on them.
Domain and DNS management
Most people, myself included, start with Cloudflare here, and it’s still the easiest sell. Cloudflare Registrar sells domains at cost with no markup, which is often cheaper than what you’re paying elsewhere. DNS management is fast. The proxy option, represented by a little orange cloud icon, sits in front of your origin server to cache and provide basic protection, and changes propagate quickly.
For a small business managing a few domains, this feature alone can pay for the time spent switching over within the first year.
R2 object storage
R2 is Cloudflare’s S3-compatible object storage. The free tier provides 10 GB of storage and 1 million Class A operations (writes and lists) and 10 million Class B operations (reads) per month. The API is easy to integrate for user uploads, static assets, and backups.
What makes R2 worth a serious look, even beyond the free tier, is that there are zero egress fees. Reading data from R2 is free, which differs greatly from how S3 and most other object storage pricing works. If you’re storing data that gets downloaded or served frequently, you’ll save significantly once you’ve surpassed the free allowance.
For a small app or website with moderate file storage needs, 10 GB of free storage with no bandwidth cost covers a lot of ground before you need to pay anything.
Member management
With Cloudflare, you can add team members to an account with scoped permissions. This way, you won’t have to share a single login and password with everyone who needs access to DNS, security settings, or a specific domain. This may sound minor, but consider how many small teams are still passing around one shared account login for these types of things. Scoped access is a basic security measure, and it’s included for free.
Pages and Workers
Pages hosts static sites and front-end builds with automatic deployment from a Git repository at no additional cost. Workers allows you to run small pieces of server-side logic at the edge, close to your visitors, without having to manage a server.
The free Workers tier gives you 100,000 requests per day, 10 ms of CPU time per request, and other technical limits that are generous for a small site or lightweight API. The free Pages tier includes up to 500 builds per month.
For a static site, landing page, or small API that doesn’t require heavy processing, this combination can eliminate the need for hosting altogether. The caveat is real: Workers’ CPU time limit is truly intended for lightweight logic. If you’re running anything computationally intensive, you’ll exceed the limit and need the paid tier. At $5 a month, it offers a significant increase in capacity and is still inexpensive.
Turnstile
Turnstile is Cloudflare’s alternative to reCAPTCHA. It’s free and integrates with just a few lines of code. In my experience, it’s considerably less annoying to actual users than the checkbox-and-image puzzles that most CAPTCHA services still rely on. If you’re currently paying for or struggling with a CAPTCHA provider, it’s worth switching to Turnstile on that basis alone.
Tunnels
Cloudflare Tunnel allows you to make an internal service, app, API, or admin panel accessible on the internet without opening any inbound ports on your server or firewall. The tunnel software runs on your end and establishes an outbound connection to Cloudflare, which routes traffic to the service.
This solves a common problem for small teams by providing a way to give clients or teammates access to something running on an internal server without setting up a VPN or opening ports on a firewall. It’s also useful for temporarily exposing a staging environment without a public IP address or formal deployment. This feature is available on the free tier with no significant limitations for typical, small-scale use.
Security rules, access, and Zero Trust
Cloudflare’s free tier includes basic web application firewall (WAF)-style rules and IP restrictions. This allows you to restrict access to admin panels or backend services to specific IP addresses or require additional authentication. Cloudflare Access, which is part of the Zero Trust product suite, takes this a step further by enabling you to add an authentication layer to internal tools without developing your own login system.
The free Zero Trust plan covers up to 50 users and includes secure access functionality. It also keeps 24 hours of DNS, HTTP, and network event logs. However, that log retention window is short. If you need longer visibility for compliance or troubleshooting purposes, the paid tiers are a good option. However, for a small team wanting basic access control on internal tools, this offers a significant amount of security capabilities at no cost.
Network analytics
Basic traffic analytics, request volume, blocked threats, and cache performance are included and provide a reasonable overview of what’s hitting your site or API, eliminating the need for a separate analytics or monitoring tool.
Email routing
With Cloudflare, you can forward emails sent to your domain to an existing mailbox elsewhere without setting up and paying for mailbox hosting on that domain. If you own a domain and only need a few addresses forwarded to a Gmail account or another email provider, this replaces the need for a separate service or mail hosting add-on.
What to watch out for
None of this is a free replacement for what you would otherwise pay for. The free tier limits are real and are designed to help you become familiar with the platform before you need to pay to scale up. For a growing business, workers’ CPU time and request caps, R2’s operation limits, Zero Trust’s 50-user ceiling, and short log retention will all eventually matter.
However, the upgrade path is genuinely gradual. Cloudflare’s paid tiers increase at reasonable price points rather than jumping straight to enterprise pricing the moment you outgrow the free plan. This makes Cloudflare a low-risk platform on which to build early on because growing out of the free tier doesn’t mean starting over somewhere else.