# Cloudflare Workers 190 Hacker News commenters recommended Cloudflare Workers and 77 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (10 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Cheap, globally distributed serverless compute that scales from zero with almost no maintenance, though its unique runtime raises lock-in concerns and access controls are coarse. ## Why people recommend it - Very cheap, generous free tier (9 comments): "If you can accept the risk though, you get cheap compute with someone else managing all the infrastructure." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924952)) "It runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1 for DB, it should easily be within their free tier for most use cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920389)) "Advantage is I use Cloudflare free tier so get denial-of-wallet prevention when my free credits run out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084079)) - Scales effortlessly, little maintenance (5 comments): "There's something really nice about not needing to patch anything for years because all you're using is the Python stdlib and scaling from zero to many, many thousands with no added effort." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239257)) "you can do a LOT with that. Once you drink the cloudflare kool-aid regarding workers they let you build very scalable apps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49967002)) "They’ve made deploying and maintaining microservices significantly easier and more cost-effective" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47671475)) - Runs at the edge worldwide (3 comments): "The main value proposition of Cloudflare Workers is being able to deploy workers at the edge and use them to implement edge use cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457147)) "with Workers they're accessible from hundreds of locations around the world so you can get this sort of speed from almost anywhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444312)) "where Cloudflare's Nairobi and Mombasa PoPs make a measurable difference over traditional hosted WordPress" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702650)) - Open-source workerd runtime aids portability (4 comments): "For a while the Workers platform didn't satisfy the self-hosted part, but I guess workerd addressed that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775250)) "when you build on Workers, you are not tied to one provider, because you can run workerd anywhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46010094)) "Your code base finally felt portable to Workers with essentially full CF platform support." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48404036)) ## What people warn about - Unique runtime means vendor lock-in (3 comments): "the cf workers runtime is kind of unique and you cannot push there any code without making it cf workers ready in the first place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611607)) "I always liked CF workers but haven't shipped anything serious with it due to not wanting vendor lock-in." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456788)) "We deliberately avoided them in the critical path because we knew we'll have to setup multi cloud" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978633)) - Weak permission scoping and environments (3 comments): "it's a very good platform. Just missing compartmentalisation features between prod and dev environments." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607189)) "plenty of resources, such as workers, don't belong to zones so essentially their code can be replaced or deleted with the lowest level permission" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47759681)) "Workers don’t belong to zones, so you can’t scope a particular user or API key access to a particular set of workers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46763481)) - No hard billing caps (2 comments): "Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611258)) "They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611462)) - Outages and reliability issues (2 comments): "last few months has been quite rough for Cloudflare, and a few outages on their Workers platform that didn't quite make the headlines too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103984)) "enough of our users were in Spain and couldn’t access endpoints at seemingly arbitrary times (due to the matches)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964932)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [AWS Lambda](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-lambda.md): 84 recommend - [Cloudflare Pages and Workers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-pages-and-workers.md): 6 recommend - [Cloudflare Python Workers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-python-workers.md): 6 recommend - [Deno Deploy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deno-deploy.md): 5 recommend - [Telegram Serverless](https://hackerapproved.com/p/telegram-serverless.md): 5 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Cloudflare Workers", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-workers/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).