Servers & VPS

What Are Cloudflare Containers and What Do They Cost?

Published 2026-10-13 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

Cloudflare Containers have no standalone price: usage is billed per 10ms on top of the $5/month Workers Paid plan, and the free plan includes none of it. The Workers Paid plan bundles 25 GiB-hours of memory, 375 vCPU-minutes, and 200 GB-hours of disk per month.

Key facts

What matters

Containers are billed for every 10ms an instance is actively running, with an included allowance on the $5/month Workers Paid plan.
Workers Paid bundles 25 GiB-hours of memory, 375 vCPU-minutes, and 200 GB-hours of disk per month, and there is no free tier.
Overage runs at $0.0000025 per GiB-second of memory, $0.000020 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000007 per GB-second of disk.
Six predefined instance types run from lite (1/16 vCPU, 256 MiB) to standard-4 (4 vCPU, 12 GiB, 20 GB disk).
Each container also needs a Worker and a Durable Object, which are billed separately at standard Workers rates.

What are Cloudflare Containers?

Cloudflare Containers is a compute product that runs serverless containers alongside Cloudflare Workers. You deploy a container image, and Cloudflare starts an instance when a request arrives and lets it sleep once traffic stops. There is no machine to keep patched and no idle VM sitting in a rack.

Cloudflare's documentation describes the product as a way to run serverless containers alongside Workers to handle resource-intensive workloads, custom runtimes, and existing container images. That last phrase is the useful one for buyers: if you already ship a Docker image, you do not rewrite it as a Worker. Each container is paired with its own Durable Object, so lifecycle and state are managed per instance rather than by one shared virtual machine.

How much do Cloudflare Containers cost?

Containers are billed for every 10 milliseconds they are actively running. That usage sits on top of the $5/month Workers Paid plan, which includes a monthly allowance. Cloudflare's pricing page lists N/A for the Free plan on memory, CPU, and disk, so a free account gets no container capacity at all.

Charges start when a request is routed to the container or when you start it manually, and stop once the instance goes to sleep. Cloudflare notes that memory and disk are billed on the provisioned resources of the instance type you select, while CPU is billed on active usage only. A container that sits idle most of the day therefore still pays for its reserved memory whenever it is awake, but pays nothing for CPU during quiet seconds.

Two more line items are easy to miss. Incoming requests are handled by your Worker, and each container carries its own Durable Object, so both are billed separately at standard Workers and Durable Objects rates, in addition to the container itself.

Cloudflare Containers instance types and limits

You size a container by choosing an instance type, and the type drives both the bill and the ceiling. Cloudflare currently offers six predefined sizes:

lite: 1/16 vCPU, 256 MiB memory, 2 GB disk
basic: 1/4 vCPU, 1 GiB memory, 4 GB disk
standard-1: 1/2 vCPU, 4 GiB memory, 8 GB disk
standard-2: 1 vCPU, 6 GiB memory, 12 GB disk
standard-3: 2 vCPU, 8 GiB memory, 16 GB disk
standard-4: 4 vCPU, 12 GiB memory, 20 GB disk

Custom instance types raise the top end only slightly: a maximum of 4 vCPU, 12 GiB memory, and 20 GB disk, with at least 3 GiB of memory per vCPU. Account-wide limits are 6 TiB of concurrent memory, 1,500 concurrent vCPU, 30 TB of concurrent disk, and 50 GB of total image storage. Snapshots cap at 20 GB and expire 30 days after creation or the most recent restore. All of these figures come from Cloudflare's limits page, which was last updated on September 30, 2026.

Cloudflare Containers vs a VPS

The two options look similar on a feature list and behave nothing alike on a bill. A virtual private server is a machine that stays switched on, so you pay a flat monthly fee whether or not anyone visits. Cloudflare Containers are billed by the 10ms and stop charging when an instance sleeps, which suits bursty, request-driven work and costs nothing when traffic is zero.

The trade is control. A VPS gives you root, persistent storage, and any runtime you can install, in exchange for patching the operating system and paying for the idle hours. Containers give you the six sizes above, 20 GB of disk at the top end, and no free tier, in exchange for scaling to zero and no server to maintain.

Pick a VPS when the workload runs continuously, such as a chat bot, a database, an automation server, or a small model endpoint, or when you need a bigger box than 4 vCPU and 12 GiB. Pick Containers when traffic is spiky, you already have a container image, and you want to pay only for active milliseconds. Current budget VPS pricing is compared in our cheap VPS roundup.

Why this matters now: Deno is joining Cloudflare

On October 9, 2026, Deno announced that the company is joining Cloudflare, in a post by Ryan Dahl on deno.com. Cloudflare has been consolidating the developer edge for a while, and the deal folds Deno's JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, along with its Deno Deploy serverless platform, into the company that already sells Workers and Containers.

For buyers the practical question does not change, it just gets louder: if your serverless container workload is heading to Cloudflare anyway, what does the platform actually charge once the free marketing page is gone? The answer is the rate table above, not the acquisition announcement.

One caveat worth stating plainly: nothing in Cloudflare's public Containers documentation ties pricing or plan limits to the Deno deal, and no official source states that Deno Deploy pricing or availability is changing. Treat the two as separate decisions until Cloudflare publishes something that says otherwise.

Who should use Cloudflare Containers?

Good fit: request-driven APIs, webhook handlers, scheduled jobs, and AI agent backends that sit idle between bursts.
Good fit: teams already paying for the Workers Paid plan, who get the 25 GiB-hours and 375 vCPU-minutes allowance without opening a second vendor relationship.
Poor fit: anything that must run 24/7 at high CPU, since provisioned memory is billed even while the processor is idle.
Poor fit: workloads that need more than 4 vCPU, 12 GiB of memory, or 20 GB of disk, unless you contact Cloudflare for a larger limit.

At a glance

Resource	Included per month	Overage rate
Memory	25 GiB-hours	$0.0000025 per GiB-second
CPU	375 vCPU-minutes	$0.000020 per vCPU-second
Disk	200 GB-hours	$0.00000007 per GB-second
Egress: North America & Europe	1 TB	$0.025 per GB
Egress: Oceania, Korea, Taiwan	500 GB	$0.05 per GB
Egress: everywhere else	500 GB	$0.04 per GB
Free plan	None	Not available

Cloudflare Containers pricing on the Workers Paid plan ($5/month per account). Source: Cloudflare Containers pricing docs, updated October 5, 2026.

FAQ

Is Cloudflare Containers free?

No. Cloudflare's pricing page lists N/A for the Free plan on memory, CPU, and disk. Container usage is included with the $5/month Workers Paid plan, which bundles 25 GiB-hours of memory, 375 vCPU-minutes, and 200 GB-hours of disk per month.

How is Cloudflare Containers billed?

Per 10ms while an instance is actively running. Memory and disk are charged on the provisioned size of the instance type, CPU is charged on active usage only, and the Worker and Durable Object behind each container are billed separately at standard rates.

Cloudflare Containers vs a VPS: which is cheaper?

It depends on duty cycle. A VPS is a flat monthly fee for an always-on machine. Containers charge nothing while an instance sleeps but bill provisioned memory whenever it is awake. Spiky, request-driven workloads usually cost less on Containers; constant 24/7 CPU work usually costs less on a VPS.