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Durable workflow engine on Cloudflare Workers · by Cloudflare

Cloudflare Workflows

Durable multi-step workflows that run on Cloudflare Workers, with retried steps, sleeps up to a year and event waits, billed per step, CPU time and stored state.

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

Overview

Cloudflare Workflows is a durable execution engine built on Workers. You define a class extending WorkflowEntrypoint; each step.do() call persists its result and can be retried with backoff and timeouts, step.sleep() pauses for up to 365 days, and step.waitForEvent() waits for an external signal. Waiting instances use no CPU and do not count against concurrency limits.

Pricing follows Workers: invocations and CPU milliseconds, plus steps and persisted state. On Workers Paid, 500,000 steps a month are included, then $0.80 per 100,000; storage beyond 1 GB-month is $0.20 per GB-month. Step and storage billing started in August 2026 after being announced on 7 July 2026.

The Free plan includes 3,000 steps a day, 100 concurrent running instances, 1,024 steps per workflow and only 10 ms of CPU per step, which suits experiments more than production. Paid raises limits to 50,000 concurrent instances, 10,000 steps per workflow (configurable to 25,000) and up to 5 minutes of CPU per step.

Workflows is tied to Cloudflare's platform and cannot be deployed to Workers for Platforms namespaces.

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Pricing and plans

Free tier · no card

Workers Free plan: 3,000 steps a day, 100,000 invocations a day shared with Workers, 10 ms CPU per step, 1 GB-month storage, 100 concurrent instances, 3-day state retention

At the limit Stops at the limit Free plan users are not charged beyond included amounts; an instance that tries to store state past the free storage limit throws an error.

Plan Price What you get
Workers Free $0 3,000 steps/day, 1 GB-month storage, 10 ms CPU per step, 1,024 steps per workflow
Workers Paid $5/mo minimum 500,000 steps/month then $0.80 per 100,000; 10M requests then $0.30/M; 30M CPU ms then $0.02/M; 1 GB-month then $0.20/GB-month

Workflows is billed on four dimensions: invocations (requests), CPU time, steps and stored state. Idle time (sleeps, waiting on I/O or events) uses no CPU. Step counts exclude retries and rollback handlers. Step and storage billing began no earlier than 10 August 2026 per Cloudflare's changelog; requests and CPU were billed since the beta. State of all instances, including completed ones, counts towards storage until the retention period (3 days Free, 30 days Paid) ends or you delete them. The $5 Workers Paid subscription is shared across Cloudflare developer products.

Source: developers.cloudflare.com/workflows/reference/pricing/ · prices as published, excluding tax.

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What it does

Durable steps
step.do() results are persisted and retried with configurable limits, delays, backoff and timeouts.
Long sleeps
step.sleep() for up to 365 days without CPU charges.
Event waits
step.waitForEvent() pauses an instance until an external event arrives.
High concurrency
Up to 50,000 running instances per account on Paid; waiting instances are not counted.
Workers integration
Workflows use bindings to KV, R2, D1, Queues and other Workers services.
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Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • No CPU billed while waiting or sleeping
  • Low per-step price for apps already on Workers Paid
  • Unlimited wall time per step
  • Free tier available

Limitations

  • Free plan: 10 ms CPU per step and 100 concurrent instances
  • Step results and event payloads are limited to 1 MiB
  • Completed instance state is billed as storage until retention ends or it is deleted
  • Only runs on Cloudflare Workers; not available for Workers for Platforms
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Who it suits

Good for

  • Cloudflare Workers apps needing multi-step durable processes
  • Onboarding sequences and drip flows with long sleeps
  • AI agent workflows on Cloudflare

Look elsewhere if

  • Apps hosted outside Cloudflare
  • CPU-heavy steps longer than 5 minutes of active compute
§6

Pricing history

  • Cloudflare Workflows adds per-step and storage billing

    Announced 7 July 2026, taking effect no earlier than 10 August 2026: Workers Paid includes 500,000 steps/month then $0.80 per 100,000, and 1 GB-month storage then $0.20/GB-month; Free gets 3,000 steps/day and is not charged. Requests and CPU billing are unchanged. Source ↗

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Alternatives to Cloudflare Workflows

Tool From Free option Stages
Inngest Durable execution and event-driven workflow platform
$99/mo Free tier
River Postgres-backed job queue for Go
$125/mo Open source
Oban SQL-backed job processing library for Elixir (and Python)
$135/mo Open source
Hatchet Postgres-backed task queue and durable workflow engine
Usage-based Free tier
Trigger.dev Durable background tasks platform (TypeScript)
$10/mo Free tier
Amazon SQS Managed message queue
Usage-based Free tier

All background jobs, queues and workflows →

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Questions

Is Cloudflare Workflows free?

Yes, the Workers Free plan includes 3,000 steps a day and 1 GB-month of storage, with small CPU limits.

How is Cloudflare Workflows priced?

Like Workers (requests and CPU time) plus steps at $0.80 per 100,000 beyond 500,000 a month and storage at $0.20 per GB-month beyond 1 GB-month on Workers Paid.

Do retries count as Cloudflare Workflows steps?

No. Step counts exclude retries and rollback handlers.

How long can a Cloudflare Workflow sleep?

Up to 365 days per step.sleep() call.

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