Cloudflare:
Today, we’re announcing a Free Tier for Workers KV that opens up global, low-latency data storage to every developer on the Workers platform. Additionally, to expand Workers KV’s use cases even further, we’re also raising the maximum value size from 10 MB to 25 MB. You can now write an application that serves larger static files directly or JSON blobs directly from KV.
Cloudflare announced this a few weeks ago, but I’m just getting to writing about it now. Workers KV is Cloudflare’s globally-distributed key-value storage service, and it’s the storage backbone that powers Workers Sites – Cloudflare’s static site hosting product, which happens to be what I use to host this site.
Workers Sites requires Workers KV because it uses the key-value storage service to store web pages (URL is the key, HTML is the value). Previously, Workers KV was only available on a $5/month (starting price) Workers Bundled plan, and there was no free tier. Now, $5/month doesn’t sound like much for a high-performance edge computing service, but Cloudflare plays in the same arena as Netlify and Vercel – two static hosting providers that both offer free tiers.
I don’t have extensive data to back this up, but I think Cloudflare’s lack of a free Workers tier that included its KV storage product made it difficult for people to experiment with it for hosting static sites and migrating off Netlify and Vercel. This was certainly the case for a few people I spoke with.
With this new and generous free tier in place, it’s now possible to host static sites via Cloudflare Workers Sites for free! There are, of course, a few Workers KV compute and storage limits in place (in addition to the standard Workers limits), but most static sites will rarely hit these limits.
- 100,000 read operations per day.
- 1,000 list, write, and delete operations per day.
- 1 GB of storage on Workers KV.
The previous $5/month minimum for deploying a static site on Cloudflare’s super fast network kept many people from trying out Cloudflare Workers Sites. With that monthly minimum out of the way, I’m willing to bet we’ll see a lot more static sites migrate to Cloudflare over the coming months. With the increased performance and programmability compared to Netlify and Vercel, I bet some people (like me) will even choose to pay a very reasonable $5/month to host on Cloudflare over a free tier on another slower and less flexible provider.