Why Cloudflare, for Free
This whole site, DNS to database, runs on Cloudflare's free tier. The monthly bill is zero. A small love letter to a platform, and the case for using it. (If you want the nuts-and-bolts of how this site is wired, that is a separate page.)
A typical side project in 2026 bleeds money in five directions at once: one provider for the frontend, another for the backend, object storage here, a database there, a CDN on top. Every one of them bills separately, and the wiring between them is where weekends go to die. This site takes the opposite bet: one platform for all of it. The only thing I pay for is the domain registration itself, at wholesale cost, through the same provider.
What the free tier actually includes
The free tier is not a trial with a fuse on it. It is a genuinely usable platform:
One of the fastest authoritative DNS services in the world, at the same price as doing it badly: free.
Always-on, unmetered mitigation in front of everything you host.
A global anycast network of 300+ locations caching your site next to your visitors.
Certificates issued and renewed automatically. Nobody should pay for a padlock in this decade.
Managed rules against the common attacks, before requests ever reach your code.
Static hosting with unlimited bandwidth, plus 100k serverless requests a day on V8 isolates with no cold starts.
When a workload needs a real container instead of an isolate, those run on the same platform.
Strongly consistent, single-location state for coordination problems: counters, rooms, locks.
S3-compatible object storage, 10GB free, and the headline act: zero egress fees, forever.
Globally replicated key-value storage for config and cache-shaped data.
Serverless SQLite at the edge. Five million reads a day on the free tier.
At-least-once message delivery between Workers for anything asynchronous.
Open-weight LLMs and embedding models running on Cloudflare's GPUs, with a free daily allocation.
Request logs, analytics, and git-integrated deployments with per-branch previews, built in.
If you are an individual
A portfolio or résumé site is the perfect shape for this stack. Buy your domain at cost, point it at Pages, push your site to git, and you are done: global CDN, automatic HTTPS, unlimited bandwidth, and deployments that happen because you committed. Total running cost: the domain. If a recruiter in another continent opens your site, it loads from a cache near them, not from a $5 VPS you forgot to patch.
And when you want one dynamic feature, a contact form, a view counter, a poll like the one on this site, you do not need to rent a backend. A Worker and a D1 table cover it, in the same repo, deployed by the same push.
If you are a small business
The same stack digitizes a small business without an ops team. The storefront or landing site goes on Pages. Booking and contact forms are Workers. Product photos live in R2, where the zero egress fee means a busy month does not turn into a surprise invoice. Customer records fit in D1, background work like sending confirmations goes through Queues, and Workers AI can power a first-line support assistant on open models without renting a GPU.
The pattern that matters: start at zero cost with real capacity, and pay only when the business actually grows into it. The upgrade path is a pricing page, not a migration.