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Quick Tip: Deploy a Scheduled Job on Cloudflare Workers for $0 (No Server Needed)

Quick Tip: Deploy a Scheduled Job on Cloudflare Workers for $0 — No Server Needed

I used to pay $5/month for a VPS whose only job was running a cron task every hour. Then I moved it to Cloudflare Workers with Cron Triggers — free tier gives you 100,000 requests/day and up to 1,000 scheduled triggers per account. My bill went to $0.

Here's the whole thing:

// worker.js
export default {
  async scheduled(event, env, ctx) {
    // runs on the cron schedule below
    const res = await fetch("https://api.example.com/ping", {
      headers: { "Authorization": `Bearer ${env.API_TOKEN}` }
    });
    console.log("status:", res.status);
  },
};
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# wrangler.toml
name = "hourly-job"
main = "worker.js"
compatibility_date = "2026-08-01"

[vars]
# non-secret config here

[triggers]
crons = ["0 * * * *"]   # every hour, standard cron syntax
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Deploy with one command:

npx wrangler deploy
npx wrangler secret put API_TOKEN
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Why this beats a VPS for small jobs:

$5 VPS Cloudflare Workers Free
Monthly cost $5 $0
Cold start none (always on) ~0ms (V8 isolates)
Maintenance you patch the OS none
Cron limit your uptime 1,000 triggers/account
Failure alerting DIY built-in logs via wrangler tail

The catch: a Worker execution is capped at 30 seconds of wall-clock CPU time on the free plan (CPU time limit is 10ms default, configurable up to 30s). If your job is a nightly batch that chews data for 10 minutes, keep the VPS. For webhooks, pings, cache warm-ups, and API polling, this is strictly better.

I draft and test Worker scripts with this free AI coding assistant before deploying: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF

What's the smallest thing you still run a whole server for?

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