Websites and hosting decision
Cloudflare Workers
Keep paying — Cloudflare's global edge, platform-scale infrastructure, and bundled security/features are not realistically replaced by a small self-hosted project.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Serve HTTP requests with user code at low latency, store small state, and deploy updates via a developer CLI.
What it still won’t have
- Global 335+ city edge network and low-latency Smart Placement
- Built-in DDoS/WAF/bot protections and platform security
- Massive scale and uptime SLA
- Integrations and ecosystem (Workers AI, Vectorize, R2, D1) running on the same network
- Operational simplicity of a fully managed, pay-for-execution platform
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Run everywhere Security, connectivity, and code run in 335+ cities around the world, within 50ms of 95% of the world's population.
- Infrastructure at scale
Run at massive scale No more capacity planning. Ever.
- Brand trust
Cloudflare powers 42% of the Fortune 500 Trusted by the teams you trust.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 10 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-region self-hosted 'edge-like' serverless service using Node.js + Express on a $20/month VPS (Ubuntu). Include: an HTTP runtime that loads and executes user JS handlers in a sandboxed worker process (use vm2 or isolated subprocesses), a CLI to bundle and deploy scripts (zip + HTTP POST), a KV-compatible REST API backed by Redis, a simple per-key locking layer for durable-object-like coordination (Redis locks), and logging/metrics integration (Prometheus pushgateway). Out of scope: global multi-region placement, DDoS mitigation, managed GPU/LLM inference, and enterprise SLA. Provide retries, authentication for the deploy API, input validation, error handling, and unit/integration tests covering deploy, request execution, KV reads/writes, and lock behavior.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score28
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCloudflare home
- official pricingCloudflare plans
- official docsCloudflare developer docs
- open sourceWasmEdge/WasmEdge
- open sourceTIBCOSoftware/flogo
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
