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.

Products with usage-based billing

The following products bill based on consumption. Each product includes a free tier — you are only charged for usage that exceeds the included amount.

For current overage rates, refer to the Cloudflare plans page ↗ or each product's pricing page linked below. Rates may change — the links below are always up to date.

Product	Billable metric	Free tier (included)	Pricing details
Workers	Requests, CPU time	10M requests, 30M CPU-ms	Workers pricing
R2	Storage, operations	10 GB storage, 1M Class A, 10M Class B	R2 pricing
Argo Smart Routing	Data transfer (GB)	First 1 GB	Argo pricing
Cache Reserve	Reads, writes, storage	None	Cache Reserve pricing
Load Balancing	DNS queries	First 500K	Load Balancing
Stream	Minutes stored, minutes viewed	Varies by plan	Stream pricing
Images	Transformations, storage	Varies by plan	Images pricing
Spectrum	Data transfer (GB)	None	Spectrum

Optimize usage-based costs

Reducing usage-based charges starts with understanding where your consumption comes from. Use the billable usage dashboard to identify which products are driving costs, then apply the strategies below.

Strategy	What it reduces
Increase cache hit ratio with longer TTLs and appropriate `Cache-Control` headers	Argo data transfer, Workers invocations, origin load
Use Cache Reserve for long-tail content	Origin fetches for infrequently accessed assets
Set up R2 lifecycle rules to transition cold data to Infrequent Access	R2 storage costs
Use Workers Smart Placement for data-heavy Workers	Workers CPU time
Batch R2 operations where possible instead of per-object reads	R2 Class B operation count
Set up budget alerts to catch unexpected spikes early	All products — prevents surprise invoices

For a detailed walkthrough of how a single request generates charges across multiple products, refer to How charges accrue.

Monitor your usage

The billable usage dashboard gives Pay-as-you-go customers daily visibility into usage-based costs. The dashboard shows a daily cost breakdown chart and a per-product usage table with free-tier allowances, so you can see exactly what you are being charged for.

You can also set up budget alerts to get notified by email when your account-wide spend crosses a dollar threshold you define.