Cloudflare Workers vs DigitalOcean App Platform
Pricing
Cloudflare Workers: Free tier (100,000 requests/day), paid from $5/mo
DigitalOcean App Platform: Free for static sites, from $5/mo for apps
Description
Cloudflare Workers: Serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust code and full-stack apps on Cloudflare's global network
DigitalOcean App Platform: Simple cloud hosting with managed infrastructure: deploy from GitHub without touching servers
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
- Predictable pricing with no surprise bandwidth bills: $5/month gets you a real server
- Free static site hosting with 3 static sites included
- Backed by a public company (since 2021): low risk of shutting down
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
- App Platform is less polished than Vercel or Railway for developer experience
- Fewer framework auto-detections: you often need to configure build commands manually
- Scaling is manual unless you set up additional configuration
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.
DigitalOcean has been around since 2011 and went public in 2021. The App Platform is their answer to Heroku and Render: connect a GitHub repo, pick your runtime, deploy. It is not the slickest developer experience, but it is reliable and the pricing is transparent. A $5/month Basic instance runs a small app without the billing surprises that come with usage-based platforms.
The sweet spot for solo founders is pairing App Platform with DigitalOcean’s managed databases ($15/month for Postgres). You get a production-grade setup for $20/month total with clear, fixed pricing. The downside is less magic: where Vercel auto-detects your Next.js settings and Railway auto-provisions databases, DigitalOcean expects you to configure things yourself. If you value predictability over convenience, that is a reasonable trade.
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