Originally published at devtoolpicks.com
Cloudflare's free tier is genuinely hard to beat. Free DNS, free DDoS protection, free SSL, and a global CDN for personal projects and early-stage SaaS products. Most indie hackers never need anything else.
The reasons to switch are specific: account terminations happen without warning and with no appeals process. Business plans cost $200/month per domain, a steep jump from the $20 Pro tier. And some workloads, specifically bandwidth-heavy sites and edge computing, are cheaper and more portable on alternatives.
Here are the four most relevant Cloudflare alternatives for indie hackers in 2026, organized by use case.
Quick Verdict
| Tool | Best For | Free Tier | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bunny.net | CDN + DDoS, simple pricing | No free tier | $0.005/GB, min $1/mo |
| Amazon CloudFront | CDN if you're on AWS | 1TB/mo, 12 months | $0.0085/GB after free |
| Deno Deploy | Workers alternative, edge compute | 100K req/day | $20/mo (Pro) |
| Nginx + Hetzner VPS | Full control, no vendor lock-in | N/A (self-managed) | ~€5.83/mo (CX22) |
Bunny.net
Bunny.net is the most direct Cloudflare CDN alternative for indie hackers. It is a European CDN provider that charges per gigabyte of bandwidth delivered with no subscription fee. The minimum monthly spend is $1.
Pricing: CDN bandwidth starts at $0.005/GB for North America and Europe, with slightly higher rates for other regions. Edge Storage costs $0.01/GB per region per month. DNS is available at $0.17/month per zone. There is no free tier, but the pay-as-you-go model means a low-traffic site pays almost nothing.
What makes it worth considering: Bunny.net is a European company that does not operate as an application-layer proxy in the same way Cloudflare does. You are not routing all your traffic through a single US corporation. Account terminations do happen in the CDN industry, but Bunny.net has a significantly better reputation for account stability than Cloudflare.
For bandwidth-heavy sites, the per-GB pricing is genuinely cheaper than Cloudflare Pro at scale. A site serving 10TB/month pays roughly $50 on Bunny.net versus the flat $20/month Pro plan, but gets no WAF or bot management. The comparison is closest for media-heavy sites or apps serving large files.
The catch: Bunny.net has no WAF, no edge compute equivalent to Workers, and no Zero Trust networking. If you use Cloudflare for security beyond basic DDoS protection, Bunny.net does not replace those features. It is a CDN and storage provider, not a security platform. The lack of a WAF also means you need to handle bot management and rate limiting at the origin server level.
Another practical consideration: Bunny.net does not operate in transparent proxy mode the way Cloudflare does. You point your asset subdomain to Bunny.net rather than routing your entire domain through it. This means Bunny.net does not hide your origin server's IP address from the public internet the way Cloudflare free does.
Who should use it: Indie hackers who use Cloudflare primarily for caching, CDN, and DNS and want simpler pricing with reduced single-vendor risk. Also strong for video, audio, or asset-heavy projects where predictable bandwidth billing matters.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is the right Cloudflare CDN alternative if you are already running infrastructure on AWS. The integration with S3, Lambda@Edge, Route 53, and the AWS WAF is tight. There is no separate account to manage.
Pricing: CloudFront charges $0.0085/GB for North America and Europe on the first 10TB per month. The AWS free tier includes 1TB of data transfer and 10 million HTTP requests per month for the first 12 months. After the free period, most small SaaS products pay a few dollars per month.
What makes it worth considering: If your app already runs on EC2, Fargate, or Lambda, using CloudFront as your CDN reduces the number of vendors and keeps everything in one billing dashboard. AWS accounts do not get terminated without significant notice and process. Security team reviews at large organizations are also much simpler when CDN is part of your existing AWS estate.
The catch: AWS's configuration complexity is real. CloudFront distributions involve more setup than Cloudflare or Bunny.net. Cache invalidations cost money ($0.005 per path after the first 1,000 per month). For a simple site with no existing AWS infrastructure, CloudFront introduces more overhead than it solves.
Who should use it: Solo developers or small teams already deploying on AWS who want to consolidate CDN into their existing AWS account. Not worth the setup for anyone outside the AWS ecosystem.
Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy is the most relevant alternative to Cloudflare Workers for indie hackers building edge compute functions. It runs JavaScript and TypeScript on a global edge network close to your users.
Pricing: The free tier allows 100,000 requests per day, which covers most small projects indefinitely. The Pro plan starts at $20/month for higher volumes, custom domains with analytics, and increased CPU limits. Unlike Cloudflare's pricing model where KV storage, queues, and compute are each separately metered, Deno Deploy's pricing is simpler to predict.
What makes it worth considering: Deno Deploy uses standard Web APIs (Fetch, SubtleCrypto, ReadableStream) rather than Cloudflare-specific APIs, making code more portable. You can run the same code locally with the Deno runtime without mocking anything. For developers building API proxies, URL shorteners, auth middleware, or lightweight server-side logic, Deno Deploy is a closer match to Workers than any other alternative. The deployment experience is also fast: push to GitHub and your function is live within seconds.
The catch: Deno Deploy's global network is smaller than Cloudflare's. The ecosystem of built-in services (KV storage, Queues, Durable Objects) is less mature than Cloudflare's Workers platform. If you have already built extensively on Cloudflare Workers, the migration is non-trivial because the APIs differ despite similar concepts.
Who should use it: Indie hackers building new edge functions who want Cloudflare Workers-equivalent functionality without tying themselves to Cloudflare's ecosystem.
Nginx + Hetzner VPS
The most radical Cloudflare alternative is no CDN vendor at all. A Hetzner CX22 VPS running Nginx with Let's Encrypt handles SSL termination, gzip compression, static file serving, and basic rate limiting for roughly €5.83/month.
Pricing: Hetzner CX22 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) costs approximately €5.83/month. Hetzner includes 20TB of bandwidth per month at no extra charge. Let's Encrypt SSL is free. Total cost: under $10/month.
What makes it worth considering: Zero vendor dependency. No account can be terminated. No per-request billing surprises. No policy enforcement from a third-party proxy. Your server, your rules. For indie hackers running Laravel, Django, or any backend app on a Hetzner VPS, Nginx already handles most of what Cloudflare free does: SSL, static file serving, compression, and basic caching.
Nginx rate limiting is also surprisingly capable. With a few lines of configuration you can limit requests per IP, block known bot user agents, and serve cached static files directly without hitting your application. For a typical SaaS product with 1,000-10,000 monthly active users, a well-configured Nginx setup handles the workload cleanly.
The trade-off is the absence of a global CDN. Assets are served from one server location. For a SaaS product with users concentrated in one region, this matters less than it might seem. For global traffic, you need a separate CDN for static assets.
For decisions around VPS hosting and how this compares to managed platforms, the Vercel vs Railway vs Hetzner guide covers when self-hosting makes financial sense.
Who should use it: Developers already running a VPS who want to reduce vendor count and monthly bills. Also the right choice if you have had Cloudflare account issues and want an infrastructure setup with no single-vendor dependency.
Cloudflare's free tier remains the best zero-cost CDN and DNS option available. Before switching, it is worth being clear on what problem you are actually solving.
If your problem is cost: Cloudflare free covers most indie hackers indefinitely. The Pro plan at $20/month per domain adds WAF rules and image optimization. The Business plan at $200/month per domain is genuinely expensive, but most indie hackers never need it.
If your problem is account risk: Cloudflare has terminated accounts without warning, sometimes for content moderation decisions, sometimes for policy violations, and sometimes without a clear public explanation. When your DNS, CDN, DDoS, and SSL all run through one provider, losing the account means losing everything at once. Using Bunny.net for CDN and keeping your domain DNS with a registrar like Porkbun or Namecheap separates these risks meaningfully.
If your problem is features: Workers and R2 are Cloudflare-specific and have no exact equivalent elsewhere. Deno Deploy covers most Workers use cases for new projects but migrating existing Workers code takes real work.
For domain registrar context that intersects with DNS choices, the Namecheap vs Porkbun vs Cloudflare Registrar comparison covers whether keeping your domain at Cloudflare Registrar still makes sense even if you move your CDN elsewhere.
Most indie hackers do not need to leave Cloudflare. But it is worth knowing where you would go if the account disappeared tomorrow.
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