How Cloudflare Container Pricing Compares to Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, Azure Container Apps, Railway, Digital Ocean App Platform, and Heroku Dynos

Cloudflare recently announced a new Container Platform product coming mid 2025.

Here we'll compare how it stacks up to serverless container offerings from other clouds.

Cloudflare Containers

Cloudflare Containers are a serverless container offering allowing you to run containerized workloads on Cloudflare's virtualized hardware. If you can run it in a container then you can run it on Cloudflare.

This offering is similar to serverless container offerings from other providers:

• AWS Fargate
• Azure Container Apps
• Digital Ocean App Platform
• Google Cloud Run
• Heroku Dynos
• Railway

One of the biggest benefits is the first class integrations with Cloudflare's other products - Workers, Durable Objects, R2 etc. The announcement post includes several example apps you can build by combining these.

Other features:

• Scale to zero (something AWS Fargate and Digital Ocean App Platform do not provide)
• Autoscaling
• 1 TB of free data transfer per month (internal to Cloudflare)

How Cloudflare Container Pricing Compares to other Serverless Offerings

In the announcement post, Cloudflare provides a comparison between their containers and Google Cloud Run.

Scenario:

• 25 million requests
• 500 ms wall time

Their calculations show that Cloudflare comes out cheaper which is true under some circumstances but, as we'll see, not all.

I've added serverless container offerings to CloudCompare to make these kinds of comparisons easier.

Some assumptions:

• Containers are running for the whole month
• No free tier
• Region closest to Atlanta, GA
• Egress and per request costs omitted
• Each machine is 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM (or closest configuration)

Prices:

• Digital Ocean App Platform - $50
• AWS Fargate - $71
• Railway - $80
• Google Cloud Run (Always On) - $114
• Cloudflare Containers - $130
• Google Cloud Run (On Demand) - $150
• Azure Container Apps - $155
• Heroku Dyno M - $250

So Cloudflare Containers is relatively competitive but really comes out to ~middle of the pack in terms of cost. Where it really shines is its integrations to its other products which many developers love.

Plus Cloudflare offers very generous free tiers for many of its products - just watch out for when the sales reps come calling cause the pro tiers are often relatively steep.

Next

I generally like serverless container offerings. They come with convenience charges but I like the flexibility they provide - little server maintenance and if it runs in one place, it can run anywhere.

I'm currently running my containerized workloads on a VPS configured with Coolify as it's MUCH cheaper (~90%) and not much extra work. That said I'd be happy to use serverless containers if the need arose - and this site is still hosted with Google Cloud Run.

CloudCompare also has comparisons for Egress Costs and Object Storage offerings if you want to compare additional services.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• Comparing Cloud Egress Costs - Azure vs Digital Ocean vs Google Cloud vs Railway
• How I host my Server-Side-Rendered F# site on Google Cloud for less than $1 per month
• Hosting my Docker Container on a VPS with Coolify as a PaaS with GitHub Autodeploys