Workers rock

2025.11.21 · 2min

Cheap (free), scales really well and forces you to apply Web Standards, thats what makes me think Cloudflare Workers are the best way to deploy Typescript web applications

Having workerd as its runtime engine not only makes it really efficient and edge-able, but also makes you think better on how to architect your code in a way that makes it really scalable and might even cost you nothing, at least until you handle plenty of users which by that point you are (hopefully) making plenty of money.

And you can deploy pretty much anything in Workers, whether its fullstack webapps like Next.js or Tanstack Start, or simple decoupled stacks like Hono/Elysia + a Vite SPA or a simple static Astro site, Workers does it all and with those option you have pretty much everything covered.

So Workers rock, but there has to be some catches; well yes, and for that we’ll make a list:

First of all the dashboard is really confusing
And for the obvious, you cant have state within your server, it has to live somewhere else which is fine but it definitely costs you some ms’s on every request, specially when you have to initialize and carry auth. logging, db connection on every request, so if you’re not careful with cache that can be dangerous
It’s not compatible with any Node API that interact with an old-fashioned server since workerd doesnt really an OS to interact with
Which also brings up: No executable binaries like the well-known and needed ffmpeg
Can’t really make CPU exhausting processes
On the free-tier you really cant have complex hashing functions like bcrypt on your auth cause it will timeout
Did I mention database connections are expensive when theres no Pool?
No filesystem, which means no temp files

BUT, as Nietzsche said:

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

And thats exactly what Workers gives you, stronger understanding and things you get for granted when locally deploying stuff, it makes you dig deeper and deeper for that satisfaction to be deploying on such performant cloud and have the reliability of the biggest internet infrastructure and security company worldwide.

Beside Cloudflare improving everyday and making itself more Node compatible, there are way more products I havent talked about yet, like their awesome File Storage service, R2, which not only gives a generous free tier, but also allows free-egress; D1, their SQLite service (tops at 10Gb but that talk is for another day); Hyperdrive that lets you bring any Mysql/Postgres database to the Worker network; KV, Redis-like service for easy cheap reads.

Workers are really controversial, but theres no denying over how beneficial they are at the end of the day, beside their (decreasing) caveats. I personally will keep starting my personal projects (like Fierrazo, Klypeo, etc) on Workers cause it makes it SO much easier to (and for free).