How I Run 3 SaaS Products on $0/Month Hosting (Cloudflare Workers Architecture)

Everyone tells you SaaS needs servers. Monthly bills. DevOps. Infrastructure.

I run 3 commercial products — and my hosting bill is $0/month.

Here's exactly how.

The Stack

• Frontend: Static HTML/CSS/JS on Cloudflare Pages (free)
• Backend: Cloudflare Workers (100K requests/day free)
• Database: Workers KV + D1 (free tier covers everything)
• Payments: CardPointe (no monthly fee, just per-transaction)
• Email: MailChannels via Workers (free)
• CDN/SSL: Cloudflare (obviously free)

The Products

1. Scan0tron ($49) — AI screen capture + auto-fill. Desktop app (Electron) talks to a Worker API for license validation.
2. JRD Garage ($99) — Auto shop management. Full work orders, CRM, parts tracking. All serverless.
3. SiteSweep ($79) — Location intelligence. 10-factor scoring algorithm rates business sites C through AAA.

All one-time purchase. No subscriptions.

Why This Works

Cloudflare Workers run at the edge in 300+ cities. Cold start is ~0ms (not Lambda's 500ms+). The free tier gives you:

• 100,000 requests/day
• 10ms CPU time per request
• Workers KV: 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day
• D1: 5M rows read, 100K rows written/day
• Pages: Unlimited bandwidth

For context, 100K requests/day supports roughly 5,000-10,000 daily active users. That's enough to run a real business before you ever pay a cent.

The Math vs AWS

Service	AWS Cost	Cloudflare Cost
Compute	$20-50/mo (Lambda)	$0
Database	$15-30/mo (RDS)	$0
Storage	$5-10/mo (S3)	$0
CDN	$10-20/mo (CloudFront)	$0
SSL	Free (ACM)	$0
Total	$50-110/mo	$0

When you sell one-time-purchase software, every dollar of margin matters. Zero hosting means the first sale is pure profit.

The Architecture

User → Cloudflare Pages (static frontend)
     → Cloudflare Worker (API/logic)
     → Workers KV (key-value state)
     → D1 (relational queries)
     → CardPointe (payment processing)

No Docker. No Kubernetes. No EC2 instances to patch. No RDS backups to manage. No load balancers. No auto-scaling configs.

It just works. At the edge. For free.

When You Outgrow Free

At $5/month (Workers Paid), you get:

• 10M requests/month
• 30ms CPU time
• Expanded KV and D1 limits

That supports 15,000-20,000 DAU. Most indie products never get there.

The One-Time Purchase Model

Monthly SaaS pricing exists because of monthly infrastructure costs. Remove the infrastructure costs, and suddenly one-time pricing makes sense.

$49 once → customer happy, margin preserved, zero churn to worry about.

I wrote a deeper technical breakdown here: The Zero-Cost SaaS Architecture

---

Building these at jrdconnect.com. Happy to answer questions about the architecture.