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Cover image for Ditch Cloudflare's $5k/Mo Bills: Self-Host Workers at 1/100th Cost in 2 Hours 🚀
Aparna Pradhan
Aparna Pradhan

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Ditch Cloudflare's $5k/Mo Bills: Self-Host Workers at 1/100th Cost in 2 Hours 🚀

#cloudflare #openworker #hetzner #selfhost

Are you a Series A founder or high-scale developer burning a massive amount every month on Cloudflare Workers for agentic backends, D1 queries, and Pages SSR? While juniors often buy into the "serverless dream," seniors know that V8 isolates and the "scale-to-zero" model can mean cold starts that kill latency at critical moments. It is time to break free from vendor lock-in and high-egress "hostage" situations.

📉 The Brutal Reality of Cloud Costs

The cloud was promised to save organizations money, but exorbitant data egress fees and platform dependence have undermined those advantages. For example, a business storing a massive amount of data in Amazon S3 and reading just one-fifth of it monthly can face a staggering bill.

35,350
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(Total monthly cost in USD for 1,000 TB storage and 200 TB egress)

Even on Cloudflare's platform, heavy workloads using Workers Unbound incur significant charges per million requests.

0.15
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(Cost in USD per million requests on Workers Unbound)

If you are running persistent AI agents or long-running tasks, you will hit Cloudflare’s CPU limits almost immediately. On the free tier, your execution is capped at a very low threshold.

10
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(CPU time limit in milliseconds for Workers Free tier)

Even on paid plans, you are limited to a specific duration for standard requests.

15
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(Duration limit in minutes for Cron Triggers and Queue Consumers)

🛠️ The Solution: OpenWorkers on Hetzner

OpenWorkers is an open-source, Rust-powered runtime that allows you to execute JavaScript in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. It provides the exact same Developer Experience (DX) as Cloudflare Workers but allows you to run on an affordable ARM VPS from Hetzner.

Hetzner’s CAX11 (ARM64) cloud servers offer a powerful starting point for a minimal monthly fee.

3.79
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(Monthly price in EUR for a CAX11 server with 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM)

For massive scale, you can rent a dedicated AX41-NVMe with 8 cores and 64 GB RAM for a flat rate.

39
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(Monthly price in EUR for an AX41-NVMe dedicated server)

By self-hosting, you achieve 0ms cold starts because your processes remain persistent, compared to the significant latency spikes common in multi-tenant serverless environments.

100-500
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(Common cold start latency range in milliseconds for Cloudflare Workers at scale)

💻 2-Hour Rapid Deployment Guide

You can port your existing Worker code in minutes because OpenWorkers is designed for API compatibility with the Cloudflare model.

Step 1: Clone the Infrastructure 📂
Start by pulling the official Docker Compose setup to your server.

git clone https://github.com/openworkers/openworkers-infra.git
cd openworkers-infra
cp .env.example .env
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Step 2: Spin Up the Stack ⚡
OpenWorkers requires PostgreSQL for metadata and NATS for internal communication.

docker compose up -d postgres
# Run your migrations and generate your API tokens
docker compose up -d
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Step 3: Deploy Your Worker 📦
Your worker.ts logic will look identical to what you run on the edge, supporting fetch, KV, and DB bindings.

export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const data = await env.KV.get("session_key");
    const rows = await env.DB.query(
      "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = $1",

    );
    return Response.json({ data, rows });
  }
};
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📊 Cost Arbitrage: The Numbers Don't Lie

If you process 10 million requests per month, a bundled cloud provider bill can easily scale into the thousands.

  • Cloudflare Workers: ~$5,000 at scale for complex agentic backends.
  • OpenWorkers on Hetzner: $10/mo for an ARM VPS.
  • Savings: 99.8% reduction in infrastructure spend.

By moving stateful services like your database to a dedicated server and using flexible cloud instances for stateless frontends, you get the best of both worlds. Hetzner’s vSwitch even allows you to connect these servers via a free private network so your database credentials never touch the public internet.

🏁 Final Conclusion

Self-hosting with OpenWorkers is like the difference between using a bus and owning a van. A bus (Cloudflare) is convenient for a single trip, but if you have a massive amount of gear and a predictable route, owning the van (your own server) is infinitely more cost-effective.

Stop overpaying for flexibility you don't need and reclaim your margins today. 💸

Analogy: Think of serverless as staying in a high-end hotel where they charge you for every single minute you use the lightbulbs; self-hosting is like owning your own home—it takes a bit of setup, but your monthly mortgage is a flat fee, no matter how many times you flip the switch.

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