Self-hosting costs
What an instance costs on Cloudflare's free and paid plans.
Every feature works on the Cloudflare Workers Free plan. For personal use, an instance usually costs nothing.
What it uses
| Cloudflare product | Used for |
|---|---|
| Workers | The app, the MCP server, the API, and artifact serving |
| D1 | Metadata and the search index |
| R2 | Artifact files and thumbnails |
| KV | OAuth state for MCP clients |
| Durable Objects | Live-page data, one per artifact |
| Access (Zero Trust) | Sign-in |
Staying within the free plan
The free plan allows 100,000 Worker requests a day and 10 ms of CPU time per request. Open Artifacts is built to those limits:
- Markdown, code highlighting, PDFs, and diffs render in the viewer’s browser, not the Worker.
- Large uploads stream straight to R2 instead of passing through the Worker.
- Every request path is tested against the CPU budget.
The dashboard’s Usage page shows today’s requests and database reads and writes, and warns as you near the limits. It needs an optional ANALYTICS_TOKEN secret with Account Analytics read access; without it, the page explains how to add one.
Hitting the CPU limit
On the Workers Free plan, each request gets 10 ms of CPU time. A request that needs more is stopped by Cloudflare. You might notice:
- A publish or a page load that fails, sometimes with Cloudflare’s Error 1102 (“Worker exceeded resource limits”).
- An agent reporting a failed publish that works when it tries again.
- A notice in the dashboard saying your instance hit the CPU limit today.
It usually comes from bursts of large publishes. A few hits a day are normal, and a retry generally succeeds.
To see how often it happens, open Settings → Usage in the dashboard. The CPU card shows how many requests hit the limit today and how much CPU a typical busy request uses compared with the 10 ms budget.
If it happens often, move the account to Workers Paid ($5 a month), which raises the limit to 30 seconds per request. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Workers & Pages → Plans and choose Paid. Open Artifacts needs no changes or redeploy.
When to upgrade
The free plan handles personal use; sustained bursts of large publishes can exceed the 10 ms CPU limit. Workers Paid ($5 a month) is recommended for heavy or team use.
Consider Workers Paid (from $5 a month) if you publish heavily, share public links that get a lot of traffic, or run busy live pages. Paid plans raise the request and CPU limits; nothing in Open Artifacts changes.
Cloudflare’s free allowances change from time to time. Check Cloudflare’s pricing pages for the current numbers.