Facts read November 9, 2026
Cloudflare Workers vs Vercel
Cloudflare Workers is Cuely's default hosting pick when your description doesn't favor either one: very low cost at scale with no egress charges. Pick Vercel if you care most about Next.js and React.
Side by side
| Fact | Cloudflare Workers | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Serverless functions that run on Cloudflare's edge network. | Managed hosting for frontend frameworks with serverless functions and preview deployments. |
| Free plan | Workers Free: 100,000 requests per day and 10 ms of CPU time per invocation. | Hobby, $0/month: 1M function invocations, 4 hours Active CPU, 1M CDN requests, 100 GB Fast Data Transfer and 10 GB Fast Origin Transfer per month, 1 developer seat. |
| Paid from | Workers Paid: $5/month minimum per account, including 10M requests and 30M CPU ms per month; then $0.30 per additional million requests. | Pro: $20/month, including $20 of usage credit, then pay as you go. |
| At 1,000 users | $0/month | $20/month |
| Open source | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Best for | Global low-latency APIs; High request volume on a small budget; Apps already on Cloudflare | Next.js apps; Preview deployments per pull request; Small teams that want no servers to manage |
| Watch out | The Workers runtime is not full Node.js; some Node libraries and Next.js features need an adapter. Free plan caps CPU at 10 ms per invocation, and past 100,000 requests a day it returns error 1027 (or skips the Worker, if the route fails open). | Hobby (free) is for personal, non-commercial use; a product that charges money needs Pro. On Hobby, going over the included usage means waiting until 30 days have passed to use that feature again; extra usage can't be bought on Hobby. |
Where they differ
The published scores, from −3 to +3, that decide which one Cuely picks for each need.
| Need | Cloudflare Workers | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| keep costs as low as possible | +3 100k free requests a day, then $5/month covers 10M requests, with no egress charges. | −1 Free only for non-commercial use; a paying product starts at $20/month. |
| Next.js or React | −1 Next.js runs through an adapter, not natively. | +3 Built by the Next.js team; Next.js features work without adapters. |
| global low latency | +3 Code runs in Cloudflare's edge locations by default. | +1 Global CDN with edge middleware. |
| high volume | +2 Per-request pricing stays low at high volume and there are no data transfer charges. | 0 No particular strength here. |
Sources: Cloudflare Workers pricing (read November 9, 2026), Vercel pricing (read November 12, 2026). No vendor pays for placement.