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Managed message queue for Cloudflare Workers · by Cloudflare

Cloudflare Queues

Managed message queue built into Cloudflare Workers, billed per 64 KB operation with no egress charges, and free for 10,000 operations a day since February 2026.

Visit developers.cloudflare.com ↗ Alternatives Free tier
Cloudflare Queues homepage
§1

Overview

Cloudflare Queues is a message queue integrated with Workers. A producer Worker calls send() or sendBatch(); Cloudflare delivers messages in batches of up to 100 to a consumer Worker, or holds them for pull consumers that fetch and acknowledge over HTTP from any environment. Messages can be delayed up to 24 hours, retried up to 100 times and sent to a dead-letter queue.

Billing counts operations: every 64 KB written, read or deleted is one operation, so a small message usually costs three. Workers Paid includes 1 million operations a month and charges $0.40 per million after that; one million messages a day comes to about $35.60 a month. There are no egress fees.

Since 4 February 2026 Queues is also on the Workers Free plan with 10,000 operations a day and all features, but retention is fixed at 24 hours instead of up to 14 days.

Limits to plan around: 128 KB messages, 5,000 messages per second per queue, 250 concurrent push consumer invocations and 15 minutes of wall time per consumer invocation. Queues also receives event subscriptions from R2, KV, Workers AI and other Cloudflare services.

§2

Pricing and plans

Free tier · no card

Workers Free plan: 10,000 operations a day (about 3,300 messages), up to 10,000 queues, 24-hour retention

At the limit Not stated The vendor does not say what happens at the limit, or we have not found it yet.

Plan Price What you get
Workers Free $0 10,000 operations/day, retention fixed at 24 hours
Workers Paid $5/mo minimum 1M operations/month included, then $0.40 per million; retention 4 days default, up to 14 days

An operation is each 64 KB written, read or deleted, per message rather than per batch; delivering one message normally takes 3 operations. Each retry adds a read, and writing to a dead-letter queue adds a write. There are no egress or bandwidth charges. The $5/month Workers Paid subscription covers Workers, KV, Durable Objects and other products, not only Queues. Consumer Workers are billed as Workers for requests and CPU time. What happens at the free daily limit is not stated on the pages read.

Source: developers.cloudflare.com/queues/platform/pricing/ · prices as published, excluding tax.

§3

What it does

Push or pull consumers
Deliver batches to a consumer Worker, or pull and acknowledge over HTTP from outside Cloudflare at up to 5,000 messages a second per queue.
Retries and dead-letter queues
Up to 100 retries per message, with failed messages moved to a dead-letter queue.
Delays
delaySeconds of up to 24 hours when sending or retrying.
Batching
Consumer batches of up to 100 messages with a wait time of up to 60 seconds.
Event subscriptions
Receive events from R2, Workers KV, Workers AI, Workers Builds, Vectorize and Workflows.
§4

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • No egress or bandwidth charges
  • Free tier on the Workers Free plan
  • Low price at $0.40 per million operations
  • No separate infrastructure for apps already on Workers

Limitations

  • Messages are limited to 128 KB
  • Free plan retention is fixed at 24 hours
  • Consumer invocations are capped at 15 minutes of wall time
  • Delays are limited to 24 hours; no cron or workflow features in Queues itself
  • Push consumers must be Cloudflare Workers
§5

Who it suits

Good for

  • Apps on Cloudflare Workers needing background processing
  • Buffering writes or webhooks at the edge
  • Reacting to R2 or KV events

Look elsewhere if

  • Long-running jobs over 15 minutes
  • Apps not on Cloudflare that want push delivery to their own servers
§6

Pricing history

  • Cloudflare Queues added to the Workers Free plan

    Announced 4 February 2026: Queues, previously Workers Paid only, is available on the free plan with 10,000 operations a day and all features, but retention is capped at 24 hours instead of up to 14 days. Source ↗

  • Higher limits for Queues pull consumers

    Announced 17 April 2025: pull consumers can pull and acknowledge up to 5,000 messages per second per queue, up from 1,200 requests per 5 minutes across all queues; price unchanged at $0.40 per million operations. Source ↗

§7

Alternatives to Cloudflare Queues

Tool From Free option Stages
Vercel Workflows Managed durable workflows on Vercel
Usage-based Free tier
Solid Queue Database-backed Active Job backend for Rails
— Open source
Amazon SQS Managed message queue
Usage-based Free tier
Upstash QStash Serverless HTTP message queue and scheduler
Usage-based Free tier
Hangfire Background job library for .NET
$500/yr Open source
Celery Distributed task queue for Python
— Open source

All background jobs, queues and workflows →

§8

Questions

Is Cloudflare Queues free?

Yes, since February 2026 the Workers Free plan includes 10,000 queue operations a day with 24-hour retention.

How much does Cloudflare Queues cost?

On Workers Paid ($5/month minimum), 1 million operations a month are included and further operations cost $0.40 per million; a typical message uses 3 operations.

Can I consume Cloudflare Queues outside Workers?

Yes. Pull consumers fetch and acknowledge messages over HTTP from any environment.

How big can a Cloudflare Queues message be?

Up to 128 KB, billed as one operation per 64 KB.

Sources read for this page