Cloudflare Workers
Cloudflare's serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript and WebAssembly code on its edge network.
HN commenters like it for cheap or free hosting of APIs, side projects and small SaaS apps,123456 for a pleasant deploy experience,789 and for how well it pairs with D1, R2 and Durable Objects.10111213 Complaints are scattered rather than common: one commenter finds debugging painful,14 and others raise outage and single-vendor risk or prefer a plain VPS.151617
Why people recommend it
Low cost · 3
Commenters run real apps on the free tier or for a few dollars a month, with no surprise bills.
“I've been incredibly impressed with how it's scaled”
“The thing that surprised me is how cheap it is to run. Workers free tier is 100K requests/day.”
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“I used CF Wrkers because I wanted to try serverless(1)”
Developer experience · 3
Users call Workers pleasant, fun and frictionless to build and deploy on.
“Workers are shockingly pleasant to use”
“Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless.”
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“now it's one of my favorite ways to develop and scale web applications”
Cloudflare ecosystem · 3
Workers combine with D1, R2, Durable Objects and Pages to build full apps on Cloudflare alone.
“Everything is built using Cloudflare. We use Workers, D1, R2, Browser Rendering, AI Gateway, etc.”
“durable objects and workers are game changer for me”
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“Cloudflare workers/pages/D1/R2 works great for me on the free plan.”
Edge gateway · 3
Commenters put a Worker in front of other services to act as a gateway, rewrite HTML or cut latency.
“put a Cloudflare worker in front acting as the gateway”
“I think you can make it work without leaving Gists by using a Cloudflare Worker as a workaround.”
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“we moved to an edge-first pattern with Cloudflare Workers”
Scaling · 2
Users report it scales well for apps with thousands of daily users.
“I've been incredibly impressed with how it's scaled”
“now it's one of my favorite ways to develop and scale web applications”
Caveats and dissent
Debugging · 1
One commenter says debugging is hell and DX tooling is lacking.
“Debugging is hell, but for quick projects like this I'll definitely look into it again.”
Outages · 2
Workers were blamed for a past outage, and one user worries about depending on a single vendor.
“Cloudflare Workers (a previous culprit which we've since moved off)”
“Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless.”
Architecture overhead · 1
One commenter prefers a VPS or bare metal and calls serverless a management nightmare.
“I used both for years. Nothing beats VPS/bare metal.”
Regional routing · 1
One commenter says Indian traffic is routed through Marseille unless you pay for the $25 Pro plan.
“I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on)”
Often compared with
1 moved from AWS Lambda to Cloudflare Workers
1 moved from AWS to Cloudflare Workers
1 moved from Heroku to Cloudflare Workers
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- You can just port things to Cloudflare Workers 3 mentions
- Astro Joining Cloudflare 2 mentions
- Ask HN: Deployed vibecoded apps in prod at scale? 1 mention
- Ask HN: Is cloudfare workers better than Vercel? (free tier) 1 mention
- Show HN: Independent Vet – Find locally owned vets (and corporate ones) near you 1 mention
- Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016) 1 mention
Data: cloudflare-workers.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 38
“I prefer to use Cloudflare pages/workers and a DigitalOcean droplet”
“Happy to give it a shot if it's nextjs compatible.”
“I've been incredibly impressed with how it's scaled”
“durable objects and workers are game changer for me”
“put a Cloudflare worker in front acting as the gateway”
“Talorys uses Cloudflare Workers, Workers AI, Durable Objects, and Pages”
“deploy static pages using Cloudflare Workers on your own domain”
“I use TypeScript because it compiles to JS that runs on Cloudflare Workers, which makes hosting the service really cheap.”
“I think you can make it work without leaving Gists by using a Cloudflare Worker as a workaround.”
“I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on)”
“a session-checking Worker”
“Cloudflare workers/pages/D1/R2 works great for me on the free plan.”
“The infrastructure is all built on top of Cloudflare workers.”
“Everything is built using Cloudflare. We use Workers, D1, R2, Browser Rendering, AI Gateway, etc.”
“It worked really well!”
“Stack-wise I'm strongest on Cloudflare Workers”
“They are all completely free thanks to Cloudflare Workers / Github Pages.”
“It runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1 for DB, it should easily be within their free tier for most use cases.”
“It allowed me to explore a serverless deployement (on CF workers)”
“i moved to CF worker and github”
“I used CF Wrkers because I wanted to try serverless(1)”
“This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page”
“You can deploy it in minutes on your Cloudflare account.”
“With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications”
“some people like Cloudflare more (I certainly do)”
“The thing that surprised me is how cheap it is to run. Workers free tier is 100K requests/day.”
“we moved to an edge-first pattern with Cloudflare Workers”
“A Cloudflare Worker runs on a cron trigger every 30 minutes, acting as the scraper.”
“now it's one of my favorite ways to develop and scale web applications”
“Workers are shockingly pleasant to use”
“Debugging is hell, but for quick projects like this I'll definitely look into it again.”
“Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless.”
“Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site”
In terms of a one off product without active support - the only thing I can really imagine is a significant use of formal methods to prove correctness of the entire runtime. Which is of course entirely impractical given the state of the technology today. Realistically security these days is an ongoing process, not a one off, compare to cloudflare's security page: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/se
“We use Cloudflare Workers to catch the inbound mail instantly.”
“I used both for years. Nothing beats VPS/bare metal.”
“Cloudflare Workers (a previous culprit which we've since moved off)”
“Just a small script for a CloudFlare worker that tracks how people use it.”