You’re under-utilizing Your Cloudflare Account (I was, too)

Quick confession to kick this off: for the better part of a decade, I used Cloudflare for exactly one thing. Domains. I’d point a domain’s DNS at a server and close the tab. That was the entire relationship, a glorified address book.

Then, a few months back, I actually went poking around the dashboard, the way you rummage through a junk drawer, looking for one thing and finding six others you forgot you owned. Turns out Cloudflare is bigger on the inside; a proper TARDIS situation. I’d been parking a spaceship in my driveway and using it to hold an umbrella.

So here’s the thesis, stated plainly: you’re under-utilizing Cloudflare. I was too. There’s an almost rude amount of genuinely useful, genuinely free stuff sitting in there, and most people never open the door because the names are gibberish. (More on that in a minute. Oh, we’re going to get into the names.) I admit it: I know my ass is late to the party… So, so late to the party. However, I suspect many of you are not using this tool to its full potential. I see you. I was you. Now be me.

For those of you not on game yet, allow me to show you what I actually use it for now, then hand you the decoder ring.

From “just domains” to… a lot

I still use it for domains and DNS; that never went away, and its DNS is genuinely faster and saner than most registrars’. But the list got longer.

I run databases on it now. Real SQL databases, sitting on Cloudflare’s network instead of a server I have to babysit. One of them powers our in-house marketing and CRM app — the thing that catches leads and routes them where they need to go. No MySQL server, no patching, no 2am “the database is down” text.

I run single-page apps on it — a bunch of them, somewhere north of two dozen at this point. Some are little internal tools: an SEO reports dashboard, a UTM-link builder, a couple of mockup tools, a link-in-bio page, the positioning advisor I keep going on about. Some are quick one-page sites I spin up for clients, a restaurant here, a local org there. They cost-effectively nothing to host, and they’re fast everywhere on Earth by default. (We’ve got a whole thing about building small, single-purpose tools instead of bloated ones; Cloudflare turned out to be the perfect place to park them.)

And the newest one, which I built this week and am stupidly pleased about: an agent inbox. It sends and receives email, and we mostly use it to test the forms and payment flows on client projects so we can fire a real form submission or a real payment and confirm the right emails actually go out, without clogging up a human’s inbox or paying for a pile of throwaway test mailboxes. Under the hood, it’s a database, some file storage, a job queue, and email forwarding, all stitched together. Monthly cost: zero.

That’s the part that broke my brain a little. None of this is a paid plan. It’s all just… sitting there. Free.

The reason nobody uses this stuff: the names are unhinged

Here’s my real theory on why most people stop at “domains”: Cloudflare named their products like they held a cool tech-names-only bro contest, and the worst ones were chosen. It’s the same disease AWS has: you go to use a thing, and you’re staring at “R2” and “D1” and “KV” and “Durable Objects,” and not one of those words tells you what the hell it does. Durable Objects. Sounds like a Tupperware line. Is it storage? Is it furniture? (It’s neither. We’ll get there.)

It’s a real adoption problem, honestly. You can’t use the free thing if you can’t tell what it is. So here’s the decoder ring: product name, what it actually does in human terms, and, yes, the free tier for basically all of it.

The reason why I’m using Cloudflare much more now

It started innocuously enough: I tried to build something, and when you get to the part about the tech stack that you desire, you have some ideas, Claude or Codex gives you some ideas back, and a lot of times Claude’s like, hey, did you know that Cloudflare does this thing?

Did you know it does that thing? And I’m like, Claude, no, I didn’t fucking know that. Why are you just now telling me this? Why am I just now learning this? And it’s because I just never bothered to really understand the full breadth of what the CloudFlare platform offers, period. Now, the thing is, I tend to get overwhelmed by great big walls of information, so I kind of shut down or just don’t follow through on something because there’s just too much. And that’s what AWS feels like to me; that’s what Cloudflare feels like to me, but when taken in smaller bite-sized chunks, hey, try to use this one feature; you can use it for free, or you can use it at a very low cost. That’s more approachable to me, and I just start letting CloudFlare seep into more and more of what I was doing. .

The Cloudflare free-tier decoder ring

• DNS — the address book that points your domain at your server. Free, and fast.
• Registrar — buy and renew domains at wholesale cost, no markup. Refreshingly boring.
• CDN + caching — keeps copies of your site around the world so it loads fast everywhere, not just near your server. Free.
• SSL — the little https padlock. Free certificates, auto-renewed, forever.
• Workers — run a piece of code (an API, a function, a whole tiny app) without owning a server. Free up to 100,000 requests a day.
• Pages — host websites and single-page apps, deploy straight from a git repo. This is where my two dozen apps live. Free. And whenever I have a concept I want to mock up or a quick landing page for a lead magnet, I put it here.
• D1 — an actual SQL database (it’s SQLite) living on their network. The “I run databases on Cloudflare now” thing. Free up to 5GB.
• R2 — file/object storage, basically Amazon S3 — except they don’t charge you to get your own files back out. (That “egress fee” is what makes S3 secretly expensive.) Free up to 10GB.
• KV — a dead-simple “save this value, look it up by this key” store that’s fast everywhere. Free.
• Queues — a to-do line for background jobs: “do this later, and retry if it fails.” Went free this year, which is the only reason my agent inbox is free.
• Durable Objects — okay, the dreaded one. It’s a tiny always-on coordinator for real-time things — think “who’s currently in this chat room.” The SQLite flavor is free. (See? Not Tupperware.)
• Email Routing — free custom email forwarding. [email protected] lands in your normal Gmail, with no mailbox to pay for.
• Turnstile — the privacy-friendly CAPTCHA that isn’t “click every photo with a crosswalk.” Free and unlimited.
• Tunnel — securely expose something running on your own laptop or local server to the internet, no public IP required. Free, and a little bit magic.
• Web Analytics — privacy-first traffic stats, no cookie banner needed. Free.

Go open the junk drawer

You don’t have to use all of it. Most people should start with one thing: host a little site on Pages, stand up a database on D1, forward an email with Email Routing, and just notice that it cost nothing and took an afternoon. That’s the whole drug. The second one is easier than the first.

But do go look. Genuinely. Log into the dashboard you’ve been treating as an address book and click into the developer stuff you’ve been scrolling past for years. Worst case, you finally learn what a Durable Object is. Best case, you stop paying for three other services you didn’t actually need.

I spent years parking a spaceship in my driveway and using it to hold an umbrella. Don’t be me; go do the thing. And if wiring this kind of plumbing together sounds like a job you’d rather hand off than learn, that’s literally what we do. Either way: it’s free, and it’s right there. Keep building.