Skip to content

Usage based billing

For some Cloudflare subscriptions and services, Cloudflare charges you based on how much you used a feature during your previous billing period. This differs from other services, which are a prepaid flat fee for the upcoming month (for example, plans and page rules).

For example, if your billing date is on the 15th of the month and you turn on Cloudflare Workers in the dashboard on the 1st, your next invoice includes the Workers charges from the 1st through the 15th. The following invoice includes charges for Workers usage during the full billing period.

Billable usage dashboard

The billable usage dashboard gives Pay-as-you-go customers daily visibility into usage-based costs across their Cloudflare account. The data comes from the same system that generates your monthly invoice, so the figures match your bill.

The billable usage dashboard shows usage-based overage charges only. Fixed-fee plan subscriptions (for example, a Pro plan) are not included.

Access the dashboard

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard.

  2. Select your account.

  3. Go to Manage Account > Billing.

    Go to Billing
  4. Select Billable Usage.

Review the dashboard

Chart

A bar chart displays your daily usage charges for the selected billing period. Each bar represents the total rated cost across all usage-based products on your account for that day.

Usage table

Below the chart, a sortable table shows usage broken down by product:

ColumnDescription
ProductThe Cloudflare product or service generating the usage charge
Total UsageTotal metered usage for the billing period, including any free tier allowance
Billable UsageUsage that exceeds the free tier and will be charged
Usage CostCumulative total usage cost for the product in the selected billing period

Select a date range

By default, the dashboard shows data for your current billing period. Use the date picker to view a previous billing period.

Understand data alignment with your invoice

The dashboard reads from the same data source that generates your monthly invoice.

  • Usage data is aligned to your billing cycle, not the calendar month. Your billing period start date is determined by the first purchase date on your account.
  • Costs reflect the published rate card for your account.
  • The total usage cost shown at the end of a completed billing period will match the usage overage charges on the corresponding invoice.

View covered products

The dashboard shows charges for all usage-based products active on your account. The products that appear depend on your subscriptions, for example, Workers, R2, Stream, Images, Argo, and Load Balancing.

Limitations

  • Account-level data only - Zone-level breakdowns are not yet available.
  • No data export - CSV/JSON export is not yet available.
  • Enterprise accounts not supported - This dashboard is available to Pay-as-you-go accounts only.
  • 24-hour data latency - Usage from the current day may not yet appear.

Usage-based billing notifications

If you are on a Professional plan or higher, you can monitor the usage of Cloudflare add-ons by turning on email notifications. Cloudflare sends a notification to the billing email address on file when traffic, queries, requests, or minutes watched exceed your defined threshold.

You can choose the product you want to monitor and the threshold that triggers the notification. Thresholds depend on the product.

For example, Argo Smart Routing has Notify when total bytes of traffic exceeds as a threshold, and Load Balancing has Notify when total number of DNS Queries exceeds as a threshold.

To set up an alert, refer to Cloudflare notifications.

Set up usage notifications

To avoid unexpected overage charges, configure usage-based notifications in the Cloudflare dashboard. Notifications alert you when usage exceeds a defined threshold during a billing period.

To set up notifications:

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard.

  2. Select your account.

  3. Go to Notifications.

    Go to Notifications
  4. Select Add to create a new notification for Billable Usage.