About
Cloudflare provides a connectivity cloud platform for websites, applications, AI agents, and networks. Its services include CDN, DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, zero trust access, serverless compute, storage, and AI-related developer tools.
The free plan is aimed at personal websites and includes core security and performance features such as CDN, Universal SSL, DNS, analytics, WAF, bot protection, DDoS protection, and IP-based rate limiting. The pricing page also shows paid add-ons that can be attached to the free plan, including Argo Smart Routing, Load Balancing, Stream, Advanced Certificate Manager, Access, and Rate Limiting.
- Free plan for personal websites
- CDN and global edge delivery
- Universal SSL certificate
- DNS, analytics, and WAF
- Bot protection and DDoS protection
- IP-based rate limiting
- Paid add-ons from $5 per month
Free Tier Value
Cloudflare’s Free plan is explicitly presented as a free plan with included CDN, Universal SSL, DNS, Analytics, WAF, Bot protection, DDoS protection, and IP-based rate limiting. The page also shows paid add-ons starting at $5/month, but it does not provide any concrete free-credit or free-trial amount, so those fields are null. Because the free tier is broad but still excludes paid add-ons like Argo, Load Balancing, Stream, Access, Rate Limiting, and Advanced Certificate Manager, I set feature parity to 70% and free_tier_value_usd_per_month to null since this is an always-free plan with no explicit caps to monetize.
What's included in the free tier
- CDN access for ultra-fast content delivery via Cloudflare’s global network.
- Universal SSL certificate to secure the site and avoid browser warnings.
- DNS access for fast, resilient, and secure authoritative DNS.
- Analytics for traffic, bandwidth usage, and mitigated attack requests.
- DDoS protection against application-layer attacks of any size and kind.
- WAF protection from high-severity and widespread attacks.
- Bot protection to challenge or block prevalent malicious and AI bots.
- IP-based rate limiting to protect against abusive behavior and attacks.
See Cloudflare pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Argo Smart Routing
- Optimized routing across Cloudflare network
- Smart Routing
- Tiered Caching
Load Balancing
- Local and global traffic load balancing
- Geographic routing
- Server health checks
- Failover
Stream
- video stored
- 1,000 minutes
- Video storage
- Encoding
- Playback
Access
- Per-user access control
- Per-application access control
- Securing internal resources
- Authentication and monitoring
Rate Limiting
- Denial-of-service protection
- Brute-force login protection
- Abusive behavior protection
Advanced Certificate Manager
- Flexible certificate issuance
- Customizable certificate management
Pricing extracted from Cloudflare's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
