Cloudflare Workers vs Coolify
Pricing
Cloudflare Workers: Free tier (100,000 requests/day), paid from $5/mo
Coolify: Free (self-hosted), Cloud from $5/mo
Description
Cloudflare Workers: Serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust code and full-stack apps on Cloudflare's global network
Coolify: Open-source, self-hostable alternative to Heroku and Netlify: deploy anything on your own server
Pros
- The free plan includes 100,000 requests a day, and requests to static assets are free and unlimited
- The paid plan starts at $5/month with 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds included
- No cold starts, and you pay for CPU time, not for time spent waiting on network calls
- Completely free if you self-host on your own VPS: no per-app or per-user fees
- Supports databases, apps, static sites, and one-click services (Plausible, Ghost, etc.)
- No vendor lock-in: your infrastructure runs on a standard VPS you control
Cons
- Only a subset of Node.js APIs is supported, so some npm packages won't run
- The free plan allows 10 ms of CPU time per request
- Self-hosting means you are responsible for server maintenance, updates, and backups
- Smaller community than mainstream PaaS: fewer tutorials and Stack Overflow answers
- Initial setup requires comfort with SSH, DNS, and basic Linux server administration
Details
Workers runs your code in Cloudflare’s data centres in more than 330 cities, close to your users. It handles APIs, full-stack apps built with React, Vue or Next.js, scheduled jobs and webhooks, and it connects to Cloudflare’s databases, storage and queues through bindings.
Cloudflare’s documentation for Pages now says to start new projects on Workers, and calls Workers its primary platform for building applications.
The paid plan is $5 a month plus any usage beyond the included amounts, and requests for static files are never charged. Check that your dependencies run on the Workers runtime before you commit, since it is not a full Node.js environment.
Coolify is an open-source platform that gives you Heroku-like deployment on your own server. Install it on a $5/month VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, whatever), and you get git-push deploys, automatic SSL, database provisioning, and a dashboard, all without paying per-app fees. Your $5 VPS can run multiple apps and databases that would cost $50+ on Railway or Render.
The trade-off is real: you manage the server. Updates, disk space, backups, security patches: that is on you. Coolify handles the deployment layer, but the underlying server is your responsibility. For founders who are comfortable with basic server admin and want to keep hosting costs under $10/month for multiple projects, Coolify is the best deal in hosting. For those who would rather not think about servers at all, stick with a managed platform.
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