Cloudflare Workers sound cool, but their pricing is, to me, all wrong. I'd like to try them out on some of my low-volume side-projects to see if I'll find them useful and like them, but $5 per month per site is more than I pay for the entire server for all the sites combined.
I don't like being that guy who asks for free stuff, but a free tier would at least mean that I get to spend an hour or two trying the feature out. Not that $5 is a prohibitive cost, but Workers haven't sounded good enough to take my credit card out for.
I wonder if there is some way to use these maliciously that makes offering a free tier undesirable. Five dollars seems like an artificial barrier. It’s basically free, but requires you to put some money down, and get your finances on record.
I agree, developers in general will adopt faster if it’s free, or if there is a reasonable trial period, but in this case I am wondering if there’s more to this.
We have a runtime that can be used similarly to Cloud Flare workers. You can even write JS that runs on both since we both target the browser's Service Worker API.
You can run it locally, deploy it on our servers (free credit for the first $25 of usage), or if you're a little crazy you can even deploy it to your own servers: https://github.com/superfly/fly
Our SEO app in Cloudflare uses Workers and has a free tier. No need for the $5 bucks fee. Our main use case is monitoring for SEO problems and patching them fast in Cloudflare https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ranksense
I don't like being that guy who asks for free stuff, but a free tier would at least mean that I get to spend an hour or two trying the feature out. Not that $5 is a prohibitive cost, but Workers haven't sounded good enough to take my credit card out for.