---
title: "Costs"
description: "What an install costs on Cloudflare, with the rates and an example."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://cf-orbs-site.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Costs

You pay Cloudflare for the Workers Paid plan, the provider container, awake orbs, snapshot storage and egress (data sent out to the internet).

Prices are in US dollars. They come from the project's benchmark notes and Cloudflare's published rates, so check [Cloudflare Containers pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform/pricing/) for current rates.

| Item | Cost (USD) |
| --- | --- |
| Workers Paid plan | $5.00 a month |
| Provider container (`lite`, always on) | about $2.01 a month. With `providerInstance: "standard-1"`: about $27 a month |
| Default orb (4 vCPU, 12 GiB, 20 GB), awake | $0.113 an hour fixed, plus CPU: about $0.171 an hour at 20% CPU, about $0.401 an hour at 100% |
| Orb with `--vcpu 2` (2 vCPU, 6 GiB, 20 GB), awake | $0.059 an hour fixed, plus CPU: about $0.088 an hour at 20% CPU, about $0.203 an hour at 100% |
| Paused orb | No compute charge. The snapshot storage rate is not published yet (beta) |
| Egress | $0.025 a GB in North America and Europe, after the first 1 TB |
| Amp fee | $0 on non-Enterprise workspaces. Enterprise workspaces pay Amp's self-hosted orb rate |

Memory and disk are billed for the whole time an orb runs, but CPU is billed only while it's in use.

## Example

120 awake hours a month at 20% CPU costs about $27.50 a month in total on the default size, or about $17.55 with `--vcpu 2`. For the same hours, Amp-hosted a1.small (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) costs $20.40 and a1.medium (4 vCPU, 8 GiB) costs $39.60.

On an Enterprise workspace, cf-orbs costs more than Amp-hosted orbs. The reason to use it there is that your code stays in your account.

## What adds cost

- **Warm pause.** A warm orb (one kept running for a few minutes after a pause) bills like an awake orb. With the default size, a pause costs at most about $0.02. See `warmMinutes`.
- **Prewarm.** Each deploy starts `prewarm` throwaway instances to pull the new image onto hosts. Each costs about 1 minute of the orb size.
- **Snapshots.** Each pause makes a snapshot. Run `cf-orbs snapshots prune` to find old ones, and `cf-orbs status` shows `prunable: N (X GB)`.
- **`maxRunning`.** This key caps the number of awake orbs, which also caps the hourly cost.
- **`maxAwakeHours`.** The watchdog (see [How it works](/docs/concepts/how-it-works/#terms)) pauses an orb that stays awake longer than this.

Source: https://cf-orbs-site.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/concepts/costs/index.mdx