# Cloudflare D1

36 Hacker News commenters recommended Cloudflare D1 and 30 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Cheap, zero-ops SQLite database for Cloudflare Workers with a generous free tier; critics cite latency spikes and slow queries.

## Why people recommend it

- Generous free tier (5 comments): "D2 is literally the only sqlite-as-a-service solution out there whose reliability is great and free tier limits are generous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793658)) "Cloudflare workers/pages/D1/R2 works great for me on the free plan." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393519)) "cheap D1/Vectorize, zero server ops, free tier covers most sites" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348698))
- Works well with Workers (6 comments): "Cloudflare makes this easy with D1, you can tie Durable Objects to a user as an afterthought." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46744707)) "Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401132)) "Cloudflare makes this pretty easy with D1/Hyperdrive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500005))
- Reliable and low maintenance (4 comments): "D2 is literally the only sqlite-as-a-service solution out there whose reliability is great and free tier limits are generous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793658)) "nor have we really observed D1 erroring out for extended periods or frequently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47800361)) "A tiny store on SQLite/D1 with no admin UI is boring and it stays up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373273))
- Fine for small datasets (3 comments): "If you are gathering some survey data, running a CMS, etc. you probably should be fine with even just a few MB of data; which is probably the sweet spot for D1." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803947)) "D1 is pretty much sufficient on it's own" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335715)) "D1 is fine when it fits the use case" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650088))

## What people warn about

- Slow or unpredictable latency (5 comments): "Can't claim you offer a reliable database at scale if a trivial lookup on a 10-row table resolves in 20 seconds." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46744488)) "Their database offering (D1) had some unpredictable latency spikes that I never managed to fully track down." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876232)) "Most of the time queries just take 2-10s, some even 20s+ and a few times they even hang indefinitely." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734864))
- Cannot create databases dynamically (2 comments): "my biggest issue with it is you can’t create D1 dbs dynamically" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50220205)) "it's not possible to create D1 databases on the fly and interact them because databases must be mentioned in the worker bindings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229123))
- Size and CPU limits (3 comments): "Now stuff like Cloudflare D1, the distributed SQLite based database, have its limitations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49609547)) "the 10GB limit for D1 is crazy, can you really start building on that?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798087)) "D1's 10ms CPU limit means you have to pre-aggregate everything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897133))
- Poor developer experience and visibility (2 comments): "Even just having a better DX/UI around D1 and their other current offerings would be a great start" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649008)) "There are some weird errors in d1 from time to time which i cannot debug since its all black box." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611572))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon RDS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds.md): 50 recommend
- [Neon Postgres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neon.md): 48 recommend
- [DynamoDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-dynamodb.md): 46 recommend
- [PlanetScale](https://hackerapproved.com/p/planetscale.md): 33 recommend
- [Amazon Aurora](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-aurora.md): 23 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/d1/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Cloudflare D1", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-d1/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).