Free
The server, the admin panel, the CLI, the SDK and every official plugin we ship. There is no paid edition, no licence key, and no plan above this one.
What that means
We do not sell hosting
voidbase runs in your own Cloudflare account from the first deploy. We do not host it and we do not resell anyone's infrastructure, so there is nothing sitting between you and the machines for us to mark up. That includes voidbase cloud: it signs in to your Cloudflare account and creates the instance there. The thing it makes is yours, and we could not put it on a bill if we wanted to.
We do not sell the software
It is MIT licensed and published on npm, and the version we run is the version you run. Nothing is held back for a tier, because there is no tier. If that ever changes it will be because we added something new, never because we took something away.
You might still get a bill, and it will not be ours
Cloudflare's, if you outgrow their free tier. A project with no users costs nothing there; a project with users pays for the users. Rather than leave that as "it depends", the calculator below works out what they would charge and what would tip you over. To compare it against what you are paying now, every comparison page ends with the same calculator priced against that backend.
So what would Cloudflare charge you?
Their rates, not ours, on an app the size you say. Nothing on this page is billed by us at any setting.
$0/month
An app this size fits inside Cloudflare's free plan, so it costs nothing. The allowance with least room left is file storage, at 10% of it.
What Cloudflare gives away
- Worker requests3.7k of 100k a day
- Rows read13k of 5.0M a day
- Rows written1.0k of 100k a day
- Realtime fanout5.0k of 100k a day
- Database storage0.0GB of 5.0GB in total
- File storage1.0GB of 10GB a month
What it would be itemised as
Your Cloudflare account
$0.00/month
Workers Free, D1, R2, Durable Objects
- Workers Freeno account minimum
- $0.00
- Worker requests4% of the free allowance
- $0.00
- Rows read0% of the free allowance
- $0.00
- Rows written1% of the free allowance
- $0.00
- Realtime fanout5% of the free allowance
- $0.00
- Database storage0% of the free allowance
- $0.00
- File storage10% of the free allowance
- $0.00
Nothing is billed at this size: every one of these is inside what Cloudflare gives away. The first of them to run out puts the account on Workers Paid, and the whole bill starts there rather than just that line.
Model assumptions and sources
An estimate whose assumptions are hidden is an advertisement. This one assumes each API read or write is one Worker request; a read touches about 4 SQLite rows with a relation expanded and a write about 3; a request costs about 3ms of CPU, measured on this site's own instance; and each realtime connection receives about 50 pushed updates a day. A WebSocket connection is billed as one request and the messages over it are not, and a hibernating connection bills no compute.
The free allowances are daily where Cloudflare resets them daily, which is why a monthly figure is divided by thirty before it is compared: 100,000 Worker requests a day, 5M rows read and 100,000 written, 100,000 durable object requests, 5GB of database and 10GB of files. Crossing one of them moves the account to Workers Paid, not just that one service.
Rates and allowances as of 8 September 2026, from Workers, D1, R2, Durable Objects. It is an estimate. Measure before you commit, and tell us if a number here is wrong.
What a knob turns on
The calculator prices the instance as it deploys by default: a Worker, a D1 database, an R2 bucket and the realtime hub. A few deploy knobs add a Cloudflare product that has a line of its own, off unless you set them. The rates below are the ones written in voidbase's own documentation when each knob shipped; they change, and the linked pages are the ones that count.
| Knob | What it adds | What Cloudflare meters |
|---|---|---|
VOIDBASE_DATABASE=durable | The instance's data in a SQLite-backed Durable Object instead of D1, so a batch is one transaction. | Object requests past the first million, duration while the object is active, and its storage at the same per-row rates as D1 plus a per-GB-month charge. Every query is a request to the object, so a chatty request costs more here than on D1 and an idle instance costs its storage. Durable Objects pricing |
VOIDBASE_AI=1 | The Workers AI binding and the ai plugin's chat over the instance. | Neurons, with a daily free allowance. Nothing is created on the account; the bill follows the calls. Workers AI pricing |
VOIDBASE_MAIL_DOMAIN | Outbound mail through Cloudflare Email Sending, from the instance's own domain. | In beta on the Workers Paid plan when this was written, so the plan's minimum applies before any mail does. Email Service |
--analytics | One Analytics Engine data point per request, queryable in the dashboard and the SQL API. | Per million data points. The account has to enable Analytics Engine once. Analytics Engine pricing |
voidbase sync | A build on Cloudflare Workers Builds on every push. | Build minutes: 3,000 a month on the free plan, 6,000 on the paid one and then per minute, with one concurrent build on the free plan. Workers Builds limits and pricing |
Preview instances count as instances: each has its own database, bucket and queue on the same account, and the free plan allows 10 D1 databases. The rates the calculator uses are on Workers pricing and D1 pricing.
Then how does this pay for itself?
Honestly, this is the part most open projects are vague about, so here is the plan in the order we expect it to matter.
- Sponsors. This is the main one. We would rather be paid by people who want the ecosystem to exist than take a cut of everyone inside it. Support voidbase is what that looks like, including the part where it is not open yet.
- Official plugins, free. As many as we can write. Backups, mail, the API description and the rest of the core ship with voidbase, and domains, previews, the MCP server, SEO, translations, three payment providers, a shop and the AI chat install by name from the marketplace, at no charge. An ecosystem does not start behind a paywall, and a backend with nothing to install is a backend you have to finish yourself.
- A subscription, later, for the specialised ones. A growing basket of official plugins and themes that most projects will never need. Specialised, not essential, and never something that was free yesterday.
- A marketplace where other people earn. The marketplace lists templates and plugins today and nobody is paid through it yet. If you write a plugin or a theme worth paying for, you should be able to charge for it and keep what you earn. That is the point of building a marketplace rather than a plugin directory.
The first two are how it works now; the last two are plans, and what is still undecided about them is on getting paid.
What we will not do
- Charge per seat, per project or per instance.
- Keep a feature out of the open version so a paid one has something to sell.
- Make leaving expensive. Your data exports as SQLite and files and the API is PocketBase's, so the thing you would move to already exists and already runs your code.
- Put anything behind a subscription that was free before it.
Fix it yourself. The link below opens this file in GitHub's editor and forks the repository for you if you need one, and your change becomes a pull request without leaving the browser.