Cloudflare Workers Has a Free Edge Computing Platform: Run JavaScript at 300+ Data Centers With Zero Cold Starts

AWS Lambda has cold starts. Vercel Edge Functions are tied to Vercel. Deno Deploy is Deno-only. You want serverless that's fast globally, runs standard JavaScript, and has a generous free tier.

Cloudflare Workers execute at 300+ edge locations worldwide with zero cold starts — your code runs in milliseconds, everywhere.

Free Tier

• 100,000 requests/day
• 10ms CPU time per request
• Workers KV: 100,000 reads/day, 1,000 writes/day
• R2 storage: 10 GB
• D1 database: 5 GB

Quick Start

npm create cloudflare@latest my-worker
cd my-worker && npx wrangler dev

Basic Worker

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request, env: Env): Promise<Response> {
    const url = new URL(request.url);

    if (url.pathname === "/api/hello") {
      return Response.json({ message: "Hello from the edge!" });
    }

    if (url.pathname === "/api/geo") {
      // Cloudflare provides geo data automatically
      const cf = request.cf;
      return Response.json({
        country: cf?.country,
        city: cf?.city,
        timezone: cf?.timezone,
      });
    }

    return new Response("Not Found", { status: 404 });
  },
};

KV Storage

// wrangler.toml
// [[kv_namespaces]]
// binding = "CACHE"
// id = "abc123"

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request, env: Env) {
    const cached = await env.CACHE.get("products", "json");
    if (cached) return Response.json(cached);

    const products = await fetchFromDB();
    await env.CACHE.put("products", JSON.stringify(products), { expirationTtl: 3600 });
    return Response.json(products);
  },
};

D1 Database (SQLite at the Edge)

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request, env: Env) {
    const { results } = await env.DB
      .prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE active = ? LIMIT 20")
      .bind(true)
      .all();
    return Response.json(results);
  },
};

Cloudflare Workers vs Lambda vs Vercel Edge

Feature	Workers	Lambda	Vercel Edge
Cold starts	None	100-500ms	None
Edge locations	300+	30 regions	~30
Free tier	100K req/day	1M req/month	100K req/month
Runtime	V8 isolates	Containers	V8 isolates
Max execution	30s (free)	15 min	30s
KV storage	Built-in	DynamoDB	KV (via Workers)

Choose Workers for global edge computing with zero cold starts. Choose Lambda for long-running tasks and AWS ecosystem.

Start here: workers.cloudflare.com

---

Need custom data extraction, scraping, or automation? I build tools that collect and process data at scale — 78 actors on Apify Store and 265+ open-source repos. Email me: [e-mail] | My Apify Actors