Vercel vs Cloudflare Pages

At a glance

1. Vercel runs your framework; Cloudflare runs your requests

Vercel runs your framework and bills for what it delivers. Cloudflare runs your requests and bills for what they execute.

• Vercel: past Pro's 1 TB Fast Data Transfer and 10M CDN requests, every GB costs from $0.15 and every million requests from $2.
• Cloudflare: egress costs $0, but Workers Paid charges $0.30 per million requests past 10M and $0.02 per million CPU-ms past 30M.

Prices are the vendors' listed rates as of 10 November 2026; Vercel's overages are starting rates, and examples credited to Cloudflare are Cloudflare's own.

At 3 TB a month the gap is $307.20 of Vercel transfer overage; at 50M requests it is $80 versus $12 of request overage.

Before moving, check each handler against Workers' listed limits: 10 ms CPU per invocation on Free, and a 30-second default with a 5-minute maximum of CPU time on Paid.

2. An idle await no longer chooses the winner

Fluid compute, the default for new Vercel projects, bills active CPU rather than wall time, and Workers bills CPU-ms. An idle await burns no CPU meter on either; it does not make the whole deployment free.

• Vercel Fluid compute: Active CPU starts at $0.128/vCPU-hour.
• Vercel says provisioned memory is billed in GB-hours at less than 10% of the Active CPU rate.

In-function concurrency lets concurrent requests share one instance; Vercel claims up to 85% savings from it and up to 90% from Active CPU pricing.

Workers Paid includes 30M CPU-ms a month; Vercel bills Active CPU and provisioned memory as separate metered lines.

Waiting on an external API no longer establishes a CPU-price reason to migrate; inspect transfer and request counts before touching the runtime.

3. The penalty moved to bytes and requests

Vercel penalizes byte-heavy delivery and request fan-out after allowances; Cloudflare penalizes uncached CPU work and paid requests, not egress.

The request rows apply only to requests that run a Worker; Vercel's line counts CDN requests, while Cloudflare static asset requests are free and unlimited.

Teams serving 3 TB a month or 50M Worker requests should not pick Vercel Pro: they pay $307.20 against $0, or $100 against $17 before CPU.

4. The asset limit can stop the deployment first

Consider a static export containing a downloadable asset larger than 25 MiB. Cloudflare Pages rejects that deployment shape on its asset ceiling; cheap transfer cannot rescue it.

• Pages builds per month: 500 Free / 5,000 Pro / 20,000 Business, with 1 / 5 / 20 concurrent; 20,000 files per site on Free; 100 projects per account.
• Pages: 20-minute build timeout; 25 MiB maximum per asset.

Exceeding an included traffic allowance raises a bill; exceeding an asset ceiling breaks the deployment plan. Teams whose build runs past 20 minutes should not pick Pages until the build is split, and teams deploying more than 500 times a month need Pages Pro's 5,000.

Shrink or remove every asset over 25 MiB before targeting Pages; a Vercel function that needs more than 5 minutes must be split, or checked against Workers' 5-minute CPU-time cap.

5. Caching cuts Cloudflare's CPU line; requests still bill

Cloudflare charges $0 for egress, but Pages Functions still bill as Workers requests and CPU-ms. D1 and R2 carry their own line items.

Cloudflare's own example uses 100M requests at 7 ms CPU each; Workers Caching at 80% hits changes the CPU bill:

• Without caching: (100M × 7 − 30M) CPU-ms × $0.02/M CPU-ms = $13.40.
• With caching: (100M × (1 − 80%) × 7 − 30M) CPU-ms × $0.02/M CPU-ms = $2.20.

Cache hits still cost a request, but no CPU in Cloudflare's example.

The request line stays at (100M − 10M) × $0.30/M = $27.00, so the cached total is $5.00 + $27.00 + $2.20 = $34.20 against $45.40 uncached.

Only count that saving for responses your app can safely reuse; a lower hit rate moves the bill back toward $45.40.

6. Above 1 TB or 10M requests, Vercel Pro is the expensive host

• A team above 1 TB or 10M CDN requests a month should move to Cloudflare Pages: at 3 TB that removes $307.20 of overage.
• A team whose Vercel deployment works inside both Pro allowances should stay: the bill to beat is $20 per seat plus Active CPU and memory.
• A team with CPU-heavy handlers inside Workers' CPU cap should move: $0.02 per million CPU-ms beats Vercel's starting ≈ $0.0356.
• A team adding seats faster than traffic pays Vercel $20 per seat against Workers Paid's $5 per-account minimum; it should move after confirming Pages Pro and Business prices.

Pages allows 500 builds a month on Free, and each build must finish within 20 minutes.

Count seats at $20 each, check your longest build against Pages' 20-minute timeout and check your largest asset against 25 MiB.

Cost arithmetic at volume

These are computed from the published unit prices, not measured. Each row prints its own formula, so you can replace our assumption with your traffic and redo it.

Decision matrix

Rows are the situation you are actually in. Pick the row before you read the pricing page again.

Code and configuration

// Vercel: the framework's own handler, deployed unchanged.
export const maxDuration = 60; // seconds; the platform caps it
export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const { prompt } = await req.json();
  // Active CPU bills while this code runs, not while it waits:
  const upstream = await fetch('https://api.example.com/v1/chat', {
    method: 'POST',
    body: JSON.stringify({ prompt }),
    headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' },
  });
  // Here it breaks: default duration limits kill long streams. Set maxDuration
  // and check the platform ceiling before shipping a 5-minute job.
  return new Response(upstream.body, { headers: { 'content-type': 'text/event-stream' } });
}

// Cloudflare: the Worker handler, not the framework's.
export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const { prompt } = await request.json();
    // CPU-ms bills only while this isolate executes.
    const upstream = await fetch('https://api.example.com/v1/chat', {
      method: 'POST',
      body: JSON.stringify({ prompt }),
      headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' },
    });
    // Here it breaks: no Node APIs by default. Anything importing fs, net or
    // a native addon needs nodejs_compat, and some libraries never port.
    return new Response(upstream.body, { headers: { 'content-type': 'text/event-stream' } });
  },
};

What you gain, what you give up

Migration path

Common questions

Sources & verification

Prices and limits were read from these pages on 2026-11-10. Vendor marketing claims are quoted as claims. Anything derived is arithmetic on the numbers below.

Keep reading