If my math is not wrong, running a single “standard” container during 1 month (non-stop) would cost ~55$.
This looks extremely expensive for anything other than a simple demo/toy project. I can’t think of a reason I’d use this for heavy services instead of using [anything else]. Maybe I’m not seeing the use-case?
A 1 CPU + 2 GB of RAM + 50 GB ephemeral storage on Cloudflare Containers is $74.90.
The same on Fly Machines is $31.00 (performance-1x, varies by region). Fly Machines has the same sleeping functionality as Cloudflare.
Rivet Containers also has a similar price point of $29.40, but takes a different approach to sleeping (opts for optimizing coldstarts + autoscaling over snapshotting). (I work at Rivet)
I think Modal, which AFAIK has a similar feature set to Cloudflare Containers, also works out very favorably price wise compared to Cloudflare Containers.
Say I want to deploy a service that is currently receiving 1rps at a constant rate, no upticks, no gaps. Wouldn’t that be the cost? If the answer is “yes”, then no, that is a terrible pricing.
True. Most services (unless your service is a demo/toy project, as I stated earlier) have way more traffic. It might not be evenly distributed though the day, but if you add all the CPU time in a day, I’m sure it will exceed 24h. So that leaves me with the question for who is this? Developers that are starting and want to deploy something small?
The blog post answers this. Containers was built for folks who wanted to move rest of their workloads onto Cloudflare alongside Workers/R2/AI & other offerings.
From my experience, the Workers platform is real popular among indie developers, software shops, and shops building SaaS, who typically want zero-dev ops setup and usually pass down hosting costs to their customers.
That said, compared to new cloud providers like Fly/Railway, the pricing is indeed steep.
They stated on the livestream they're considering TCP, but I suspect UDP is not coming soon since Workers themselves don't support UDP. All traffic going to Cloudflare Containers must be "proxied" through the Workers platform.
This looks extremely expensive for anything other than a simple demo/toy project. I can’t think of a reason I’d use this for heavy services instead of using [anything else]. Maybe I’m not seeing the use-case?