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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Cloudflare Workers Has a Free Edge Runtime — 100K Requests/Day at Zero Cost

#webdev #serverless #javascript #cloudflare

Serverless Should Be This Simple

AWS Lambda needs an API Gateway, IAM roles, CloudFormation templates, and a 20-minute setup. For a function that returns JSON.

Cloudflare Workers: Functions at the Edge

Cloudflare Workers runs your code in 300+ data centers worldwide. Sub-millisecond cold starts. No region selection — it runs everywhere.

Free Tier

  • 100,000 requests/day
  • 10ms CPU time per request
  • Workers KV: 100,000 reads/day, 1,000 writes/day
  • R2 storage: 10GB free
  • D1 database: 5M rows read/day, 100K writes/day
  • Queues, Cron, Durable Objects included

Deploy in 3 Commands 

npm create cloudflare@latest my-api
cd my-api
npx wrangler deploy
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Your function is live at my-api.your-subdomain.workers.dev. Running in 300+ cities.

Hello World 

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
    return new Response('Hello from the edge!', {
      headers: { 'content-type': 'text/plain' }
    })
  }
}
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The Full Edge Stack

KV (Key-Value Store)

await env.MY_KV.put('user:123', JSON.stringify({ name: 'Alice' }))
const user = await env.MY_KV.get('user:123', 'json')
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D1 (SQLite Database)

const { results } = await env.DB.prepare(
  'SELECT * FROM users WHERE active = ?'
).bind(true).all()
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R2 (Object Storage)

await env.BUCKET.put('image.png', imageBuffer)
const object = await env.BUCKET.get('image.png')
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Queues

await env.MY_QUEUE.send({ type: 'email', to: 'user@example.com' })
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Why Workers Beat Lambda

Feature Workers (Free) Lambda (Free Tier)
Requests 100K/day 1M/month
Cold start <1ms 100-500ms
Locations 300+ cities 1 region
Setup 3 commands 20+ minutes
Database D1 included DynamoDB separate
Storage R2 included S3 separate
CPU time 10ms/req 15 min/req

Workers win on cold starts and global distribution. Lambda wins on compute-heavy tasks.

When to Use Workers

  • APIs that need global low latency
  • Edge functions (auth, redirects, A/B testing)
  • Full-stack apps with Hono or Remix
  • Webhooks and integrations

When to Use Lambda/Vercel

  • Long-running tasks (>10ms CPU)
  • Large memory requirements
  • Node.js native modules (Workers use V8 isolates)

Get Started 

npm create cloudflare@latest
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Need data from the web? 88+ scrapers on Apify. Process results in Workers for a fully serverless pipeline. Custom: spinov001@gmail.com

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