Questions About Cloudflare CDN & R2 Usage, Costs, and Limits for Growing Media Project
I’m developing a project and planning to use Cloudflare. From my research, I read that Cloudflare CDN offers unlimited requests and no extra charges for bandwidth. However, I have some questions and would appreciate insights from experienced folks:
My project expects around 8,000 to 10,000 daily users, each viewing approximately 50 to 100 media files.
I plan to use Cloudflare CDN together with R2 storage.
Is there any extra cost for traffic served from the CDN cache? The first requests fetch files from R2, then subsequent requests are served from cache — how does this affect billing?
Would the Cloudflare Pro plan be sufficient for this level of traffic and bandwidth?
Are there really no request limits or bandwidth caps on Cloudflare CDN? Or is there any billing per request or per bandwidth usage?
How does billing work for R2 storage and data egress? Is bandwidth charged separately?
My project will start with low traffic and grow over time — which plan do you recommend for such a scenario?
Also, I manage WebSocket connections on my own server — does using Cloudflare CDN impact this setup in any way?
Given this, would the Cloudflare CDN Pro plan be sufficient to handle our media delivery needs during both the early and potential growth phases?
From what I’ve researched, Cloudflare seems very advantageous for these needs, but I’d love to hear about any caveats or practical tips from actual usage. Thanks in advance!
Estimated Traffic & Bandwidth
Daily visitors: 8,000 – 10,000
Monthly visitors: 240,000 – 300,000
Daily bandwidth usage: 1 – 1.5 TB
Monthly bandwidth usage: 30 – 45 TB
The estimated daily visitors and bandwidth mentioned above represent an upper limit scenario, expected in later stages of the project. Initially, the traffic and bandwidth will be significantly lower, and it’s possible that these peak numbers might never be fully reached.
I need guidance from experienced professionals. Hope Cloudflare reps or knowledgeable folks see this and reply.
5 Replies
Cloudflare does have web socket restrictions per plan, https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/websockets/.
R2 only charges for API requests and storage, egress is free. You also won’t page for cached requests. So if you have a media file which is cached then any requests to get it won’t hit R2 and won’t cost you anything.
Cloudflare Docs
WebSockets
Cloudflare supports proxied WebSocket connections without additional configuration.
They would be able to easily handle the bandwidth you are estimating
Thanks a lot cyber,
Just to confirm, I’ll only use Cloudflare CDN for serving media and static files (and R2 for storage). My WebSocket connections will stay on my own server (not proxied through Cloudflare).
For the CDN side:
Are there any bandwidth or request limits on the Pro plan?
With my estimated traffic (8k–10k daily users, 50–100 media views each, ~30–45 TB/month bandwidth), would there be any extra costs for CDN usage beyond the fixed Pro plan fee? Or is this all covered under the plan?
Really really appreciate your time and help.
There aren’t any bandwidth or request limits on the pro plan. There is no extra cost with the CDN.
Man, you’re my hero. Seriously, thank you so much for taking the time to answer all of this, you’re a legend. Really thank you sooooo much man.