Hono Has a Free Runtime — Here's How to Build Ultra-Fast APIs for Any Platform

A developer benchmarked Express vs Hono on Cloudflare Workers. Express: not compatible. Hono: 100,000+ requests/second with sub-millisecond cold starts. And it runs on Bun, Deno, Node.js, and every edge platform.

Why Hono

Hono is a tiny web framework (14KB) that runs everywhere:

• Cloudflare Workers — free tier: 100K requests/day
• Deno Deploy — free tier: 100K requests/day
• Bun — local development, self-hosted
• Node.js — drop-in Express replacement
• AWS Lambda, Vercel Edge, Netlify Edge
• Fastly Compute

Quick Start

npm create hono@latest my-api
cd my-api
npm install
npm run dev

import { Hono } from 'hono';

const app = new Hono();

app.get('/', (c) => c.json({ message: 'Hello, Hono!' }));

app.get('/users/:id', (c) => {
  const id = c.req.param('id');
  return c.json({ id, name: `User ${id}` });
});

export default app;

Full REST API

import { Hono } from 'hono';
import { cors } from 'hono/cors';
import { jwt } from 'hono/jwt';
import { zValidator } from '@hono/zod-validator';
import { z } from 'zod';

const app = new Hono();

// Middleware
app.use('/api/*', cors());
app.use('/api/*', jwt({ secret: 'your-secret' }));

// Validation schema
const createPostSchema = z.object({
  title: z.string().min(1).max(200),
  content: z.string().min(1),
  published: z.boolean().default(false)
});

// Routes
app.get('/api/posts', async (c) => {
  const page = Number(c.req.query('page')) || 1;
  const limit = Number(c.req.query('limit')) || 10;
  // Query database...
  return c.json({ posts: [], page, limit });
});

app.post('/api/posts', zValidator('json', createPostSchema), async (c) => {
  const data = c.req.valid('json');
  // Insert into database...
  return c.json({ id: 1, ...data }, 201);
});

app.get('/api/posts/:id', async (c) => {
  const id = c.req.param('id');
  return c.json({ id, title: 'My Post', content: '...' });
});

app.put('/api/posts/:id', zValidator('json', createPostSchema), async (c) => {
  const id = c.req.param('id');
  const data = c.req.valid('json');
  return c.json({ id, ...data });
});

app.delete('/api/posts/:id', async (c) => {
  return c.json({ deleted: true });
});

export default app;

Middleware

import { Hono } from 'hono';
import { logger } from 'hono/logger';
import { timing } from 'hono/timing';
import { secureHeaders } from 'hono/secure-headers';
import { rateLimiter } from 'hono-rate-limiter';

const app = new Hono();

app.use('*', logger());
app.use('*', timing());
app.use('*', secureHeaders());

// Custom middleware
app.use('/api/*', async (c, next) => {
  const start = Date.now();
  await next();
  const ms = Date.now() - start;
  c.header('X-Response-Time', `${ms}ms`);
});

Deploy to Cloudflare Workers (Free)

# wrangler.toml
# name = "my-api"
# compatibility_date = "2026-03-01"

npx wrangler deploy
# Live at: https://my-api.your-subdomain.workers.dev

RPC Client (Type-Safe API Calls)

// Server
const routes = app
  .get('/api/users', (c) => c.json([{ id: 1, name: 'Alice' }]))
  .post('/api/users', async (c) => {
    const body = await c.req.json();
    return c.json({ id: 2, ...body }, 201);
  });

export type AppType = typeof routes;

// Client (fully typed!)
import { hc } from 'hono/client';
import type { AppType } from './server';

const client = hc<AppType>('https://my-api.workers.dev');

const users = await client.api.users.$get();
const data = await users.json(); // Fully typed: { id: number, name: string }[]

Hono vs Express

Hono	Express
14KB	200KB+ with deps
Runs on edge (Workers, Deno)	Node.js only
Built-in TypeScript	@types/express
Built-in validation	Need express-validator
Sub-ms cold start	100ms+ cold start

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