Cloudflare bill shock cases
Browse first-hand reports of unexpected Cloudflare bills, with reported causes and follow-ups.
Total reported amount
$688,025.24
Source-linked reports: Amounts and outcomes come from the original reports and linked replies.
313 cases
独立开发者William (@DLKFZWilliam2): an AI bot posing as humans crawled a site, noticed only after a Cloudflare alert of over $100.
独立开发者William (@DLKFZWilliam2) says that last month a site he forgot to protect for Singapore was heavily crawled by a company’s AI bot posing as real users; he only noticed after a Cloudflare alert at a little over $100, then banned the country. No exact bill amount is given.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
Nitesh Rijal (@openrijal): a $20 bill for a test container he forgot to remove.
Nitesh Rijal (@openrijal) says he assumed Containers would not cost much, like everything else on Cloudflare, and was surprised by a $20 bill for a container he forgot to remove after testing it; he says he did not need containers and asks @CloudflareHelp whether he should request a refund.
Reported amount · USD
$20
Kun Save Point (@Savepoint_kk): a D1 bug rewrote unchanged data into a $2,739.12 bill; $2,141 goodwill credit granted.
Kun Save Point (@Savepoint_kk), an indie developer who says he recently lost his job, says a bug repeatedly rewrote unchanged data while inefficient queries amplified reads, producing a $2,739.12 Cloudflare bill already paid via PayPal (D1 rows written $2,641.00, rows read $64.06, other services $34.06); he says his bills were usually under $10 a month. Cloudflare granted a $2,141 goodwill account credit under case #02391058. He asks for it to be converted into a refund to the original PayPal payment, or at least for relief on the $2,641 write charges, and later writes that the initial request was declined and has been reopened for additional review.
Reported amount · USD
$2,739.12
Nirant (@NirantK): card charged $6,773 out of the blue with no budget alert; asks for relief.
Nirant (@NirantK) says his card paid $6,773 out of the blue while he was finishing experiments and migrating workloads to Cloudflare, with no budget or default alerts and no warning. He says he has no invoice showing the breakdown and cannot afford the bill, and shares support case #02390828. Fayaz Ahmed, whose X profile lists him as a Sr. Dev Educator at Cloudflare, replies that he has informed the team internally; the author later says he heard back by email and asks for relief from the Cloudflare for Startups team.
Reported amount · USD
$6,773
josearamosr17: Workers Paid invoice shows Paid but the account stays on Workers Free.
Community user josearamosr17 says the Workers Paid purchase for vrremates.com was confirmed by email and the invoice shows Paid, but the subscription remains Workers Free and production login is blocked by the D1 free-tier quota; billing shows bank verification pending, and the support portal fails with ErrorCode 41 so he cannot open a billing case. No amount is given.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
蓮月兎 (@LenGetuto): a ¥10,000 Cloudflare bill for a fan site after a mistake.
蓮月兎 (@LenGetuto) says that after some mistake, Cloudflare, which hosts the fan site 「蛇湖の紅梅」, billed him ¥10,000 (1万円). He says he has probably closed off the problem area and expects next month to be fine, but would consider closing the page if the same happens again. The amount is in yen and is not converted here.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
kaibo (@kaibohan): $9.9 for 35 million R2 operations on a demo site, fully refunded.
kaibo (@kaibohan) says he discovered that Cloudflare had charged him $9.9 and found that the R2 bucket behind his demo static website had generated 35 million operations. He deleted the bucket, applied for a refund and says Cloudflare refunded the full amount.
Reported amount · USD
$9.90
Revulate: a usual $5–10 bill became $2,580.48 from Durable Objects; $2,080.48 offered as service credit.
Revulate (@Revulate) says their usual $5–10 bill became $2,580.48 from accidental Durable Objects usage. Support approved $2,080.48 in future service credit under case 02382870, but the author says they need a refund to the original PayPal payment and asks Cloudflare staff for help. The author later says a follow-up case #02390382 was closed by the same agent, and that another reviewer and Finance declined the PayPal refund.
Reported amount · USD
$2,580.48
Yihui (@yihui_indie): this month’s Cloudflare costs surprisingly reached $100.
Yihui (@yihui_indie) says this month’s Cloudflare costs surprisingly reached $100, and in a reply says the bill covers several products, not only Skillry.
Reported amount · USD
$100
per month
tigerheqiang: a $400 five-year .ai registration was charged after checkout was cancelled; support declined a refund.
Community user tigerheqiang says invoice IN-84614214 charged US$400.00 on October 19, 2026 for a five-year yizu.ai registration after he clicked Cancel before the checkout confirmation completed. He asked Cloudflare to delete it within the .ai registry’s five-day grace period under case #02385887; he later says Support closed both cases with no refund and would not submit a deletion, and that Support said it would look at case 02385887 again once he passes on registry confirmation.
Reported amount · USD
$400
BowTied SaaS Guy: a $4,950 Cloudflare bill with $2,000 credited.
BowTied SaaS Guy (@BowTiedDolphin) says he ran up a $4,950 bill on Cloudflare and was credited $2,000 because no notifications were sent for the amount above $200. In a reply he says he upgraded after hitting free-plan limits and that another Worker’s usage skyrocketed because of a poor index on a public website.
Reported amount · USD
$4,950
Seven Du: a bill of over $200 for a tiny Durable Objects app.
Seven Du (@shiweidu), replying to Jay’s D1 thread, says he once used Durable Objects for a very small application that tracked daily real-time statistics and ran persistent tasks. The data involved was tiny, yet two days later he received a bill for over two hundred dollars, and he moved the job to a $10 virtual server.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
NatashaTheRobot: a surprise $10 R2 charge after choosing Infrequent Access.
NatashaTheRobot (@NatashaTheRobot) says that last week she got a surprise alert for $10 that she had to pay; she calls it her fault for picking the wrong setting but says Cloudflare did not warn her proactively. In a reply she explains she stored an app video in R2 to share with three people and set it to “Infrequent Access”, after which $10 was charged.
Reported amount · USD
$10
MaybeMonad: a $136 bill for a personal tool with 180M+ rows written.
MaybeMonad (@MaybeMonad) says a self-use tool, Deepread, meant to read bookmarked items they would never open, produced a $136 bill on Cloudflare. They say they are its only user and that it wrote more than 180 million rows.
Reported amount · USD
$136
Aaron Edwards: an accidental $1,200 D1 bill.
Aaron Edwards (@uglyrobot), replying to Jay’s D1 thread, says he had an accidental $1,200 D1 bill last month and advises caching reads heavily.
Reported amount · USD
$1,200
Travis Reeder: a $2,500 Cloudflare bill.
Travis Reeder (@treeder), replying in the thread about Jay’s D1 bill, says the same thing happened to him and he got a $2,500 bill. He says Cloudflare recently added budget alerts and he set up about ten of them to catch problems faster.
Reported amount · USD
$2,500
Alvin: a $50 bill alert after a background check read 2.8 billion rows a day.
Alvin (@YuZhongbin69124) says a Cloudflare billing alert reached $50 when it had been only a little over $10 a few days earlier. Codex found a background check reading 2.8 billion rows a day without changing anything, and the author fixed it.
Reported amount · USD
$50
wasim (@XWasim): a $25 charge for a tiny experimental app.
wasim (@XWasim), replying in the thread about Jay’s D1 bill, says he got a $25 charge for a tiny experimental app that agents built for him, and that it could have been much worse. The reply does not name the product.
Reported amount · USD
$25
Chris Board (@chrisboard_): a projected $15 Observability charge after disabling it did not apply.
Chris Board (@chrisboard_), replying in the thread about Jay’s D1 bill, says he got hit by Observability and is waiting to see how much he will be charged (projected $15). He says he disabled it in the dashboard when he got the notification, but it did not apply because wrangler seems to override it. The $15 is a projection, not a reported invoice, so the amount is recorded as unknown.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
John Guthrie (@jlfguthrie): a similar bill from unnecessary reads and writes.
John Guthrie (@jlfguthrie), replying to Jay’s post about a D1 bill of over $500, says he “had same” but that it was his own doing: unnecessary reads and writes. He says an agent found and optimized the culprits, that he then set up billing notices for spend thresholds, and that caps would be nice. He does not give an amount or name the product.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
Jay (@Cyberlane): a $513.20 D1 bill for two small personal databases; Cloudflare confirms a refund.
Jay (@Cyberlane) says two small D1 databases used only by himself for two little apps produced a bill of over $500 for reads and writes. He later quotes the invoice: 452,256,462 rows written ($453) and 60,197,421,138 rows read ($60.20) for Sep 17 – Oct 16, a D1 total of $513.20 before tax. Tyson Trautmann, whose profile lists Storage & Databases at Cloudflare, replies publicly and loops in the D1 engineering team.
Reported amount · USD
$513.20
阿曾2.0: a $142 bill after 180 million reads and writes; refund request fails.
阿曾2.0 (@web3zeng) says several websites built with ChatGPT run on Cloudflare Workers and Pages with R2 used as the database. After exceeding the free allowance he enabled the $5/month plan; the first month cost $5, but last month his card statement showed over 1,000 RMB, with 180 million reads and writes and a $142 bill.
Reported amount · USD
$142
Colbert (@sirshibaninja): charged USD 100 for memory usage.
Colbert (@sirshibaninja), quoting an announcement of an open-source platform for deploying Vite apps to Cloudflare, says he will never use Cloudflare again because it charged him USD 100 for memory usage, calling it ridiculous. The post does not name the product or billing period.
Reported amount · USD
$100
v.kleinhenz: Argo costs jumped from $400 to $5,000 a month.
Community user v.kleinhenz says Argo costs for eurekamag.com rose from $400 a month to $5,000 a month, that he turned Argo off, and that Cloudflare does not protect against such a shock charge; in a follow-up he attributes it to bot traffic.
Reported amount · USD
$5,000
per month
Sagor Hossen: R2 setup mistake produced an unexpected bill that support refunded.
Sagor Hossen (@SagorHossen3d) says an R2 setup mistake entirely on his side caused an unexpected bill, and that Cloudflare support resolved the billing dispute and issued a refund within hours. He does not state the dollar amount.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
Meathill: OpenNext KV ISR cache left unpaid TTL work and ballooned storage.
Meathill reports that an OpenNext Cloudflare KV incremental-cache path for Next.js ISR left a TODO for KV TTL, so versioned page snapshots accumulated. Dashboard billable storage showed 3.59 GB-month over the 1 GB free allowance with ongoing extra charges, and historical zombie data reached about 24 GB before he moved to a new namespace. He does not state a dollar invoice total.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
wickedev: a D1 ranking-update loop and about $10,846 across two billing periods.
wickedev reports about $10,846 from a repeated D1 ranking update: a paid $6,209 September bill plus $4,637 estimated for the October billing period. He later says a $5,704 refund was approved and is still being processed.
Reported amount · USD
$10,846
Yan Zhu (picturepan2): about $400 from a D1 row-reads spike.
Yan Zhu (@picturepan2) says he also hit an about $400 Cloudflare bill the previous month when D1 database row reads spiked. He quotes the shmily7 Durable Objects thread for context and does not report a refund or support outcome.
Reported amount · USD
$400
lojabelastock: $22.50 for about 4.07 million R2 Class A ops during development.
Community user lojabelastock reports invoice IN-83391537 for $22.50 covering 4,070,034 R2 Storage Class A Operations during automated development/testing of Bela Stock, asks to cancel the invoice or issue a one-time courtesy credit, and says an autorun routine was removed afterward.
Reported amount · USD
$22.50
user85513: $52 withdrawn by Cloudflare from an account the author cannot find.
Community user user85513 says $52 was withdrawn by Cloudflare the previous night. They could not log in to check the subscription history because they do not know which email was used, found no Cloudflare emails, do not know a domain to recover the account, and are not sure they ever signed up. They created a new account to make an inquiry.
Reported amount · USD
$52
Lion Brain: a Durable Object alarm loop from an AI-coding bug wrote about 250 million rows, roughly $210.
Replying in another user's Community thread, bennygoldstein says a bug written by an AI coding tool made a Durable Object alarm in their Lion Brain app re-index the same data every few seconds on October 10 and 11, 2026, writing about 250 million rows and costing roughly $210 in overage on Workers Paid. He says he only found out from the budget alert email, which never pauses anything, and that he opened a billing case asking for a one-time courtesy credit and a real hard spending cap.
Reported amount · USD
$210
at92uk: PayPal charged twice for one domain renewal.
Community user at92uk says PayPal was charged automatically for a domain renewal, an email then said the renewal had failed, and renewing again in the dashboard charged PayPal a second time. The portal shows one invoice while PayPal shows two charges.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
kennedy32: PayPal charged USD 10.46 but domain auto-renewal failed.
Community user kennedy32 says auto-renewal of joshtsui.com failed even though their PayPal account was charged USD 10.46.
Reported amount · USD
$10.46
user3565: domain auto-renewal failed but the card was charged.
Community user user3565 says an email reported that the auto-renewal of two domains failed, while the renewal amount was deducted from the card and shows as pending. The author did not renew manually to avoid a second charge and could not reach a person.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
salmon evil (@evilsalmon666): a Durable Objects retry loop rewrote 577 million rows into a $577 bill; one-time $250 credit.
salmon evil (@evilsalmon666) says a task written by GPT-5.6 retried every 5 seconds after its executor went offline, rewriting about 8,800 old records on each retry, for 577 million rows written in total; the small project’s bill was $577. The $10 budget alert only emailed at $333. Support gave a one-time $250 credit, described as the maximum, leaving $332 to pay. On October 10 the author described the same staging Durable Objects bug, said the default $10 alert fired only once at $333 (case #02343658), and put the bill at about $900.
Reported amount · USD
$577
forsalebypwner: an exorbitant Workers Containers charge with no usage visibility.
In a Hacker News comment, forsalebypwner says that one month they were charged exorbitantly for Workers Container usage and that there was no way to monitor or track usage until the invoice arrived.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
hung: Workers AI neuron charges billed despite expected free usage.
In a Hacker News comment, hung says that with paid Workers he was billed for confusing Workers AI neuron usage that should have been covered under usage limits, never got an answer on why, and that support ignored his ticket.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
babynarc: a Durable Objects alarm loop and a surprise bill that grew from $300 to $500.
@babynarc says an alarm loop in an old Durable Object he thought was inactive left him badly burned: he watched a surprise $300 bill grow to $500 even after killing it. Replying to Cloudflare's Dane Knecht and Kenton Varda, he suggests prepending budget-alert details to every `cf` result by default.
Reported amount · USD
$500
hfcorriez: $100+ of AI-driven extra usage over two months, reported cancelled after emails.
@hfcorriez says AI caused over $100 of extra consumption over two months. He says that after two rounds of email explaining the situation to Cloudflare, the charges were cancelled, and posts a screenshot of two negative line items (-$31.92 and -$75.42) marked Fully Applied.
Reported amount · USD
$100
sylwair: nearly $900 of usage in under two days after a project mistake.
@sylwair says a recent project mistake ran up nearly $900 in less than two days. He says he spotted it in Cloudflare's billable-usage view and stopped the abnormal service, and in a reply adds that the daily billing figures appeared with a delay, so the amount did not visibly drop after he stopped it.
Reported amount · USD
$900
Jiuhong: a vibe-coded Durable Objects bug, a $600+ overnight bill and a reported 80% account credit.
Replying on X in the shmily7 thread, Jiuhong (@indiehacker9527) says a bug from vibe coding in Durable Objects produced a bill of more than $600 overnight a few months earlier. After several rounds of negotiation stressing system defects, he says 80% was returned as account credit for future charges rather than to his card, that Cloudflare promised product improvements, and that he also received a startup credit package.
Reported amount · USD
$600
jupa.app: registered jups.app by typo for USD 8.20 and asked for a courtesy refund.
Community user jupa.app says that on October 9, 2026 he registered jups.app by mistake instead of jupa.app (invoice IN-82999647, USD 8.20), that the domain was never used, auto-renew is off and it is still within the registry’s five-day Add Grace Period, and asks a Cloudflare team member to delete the registration and refund it.
Reported amount · USD
$8.20
user10918: a Business plan bought the day before was lost after removing a domain.
Community user user10918 says they bought the Business plan for their company the day before, then removed a domain they did not own (servostock.com) after buying a new one, and the Business plan was removed too. They tried to contact customer support without success and posted under Refunds. The amount is not stated.
Reported amount · USD
Not disclosed
Containers: an author asks Cloudflare to void a $161.11 memory charge.
Hacker News user alexander2002 asks Cloudflare support to void a $161.11 Container Memory charge, saying he usually pays Cloudflare around $30 and this was a sudden jump. He later says he already tried the official support route and X.
Reported amount · USD
$161.11
ammarmalghani1: Pro plan invoices after cancelling all Pro subscriptions.
Community user ammarmalghani1 says all Pro subscriptions were cancelled in August 2026, yet invoice IN-78147673 ($25.00, Sep 6) was charged to the card and IN-82450411 ($25.00, Oct 6) was issued. The author asks for a refund of the first, voiding of the second and a review of earlier billing.
Reported amount · USD
$25
per month
bosschris011: charged $84 for three domains while the account was suspended.
Community user bosschris011 says their original account was blocked or suspended, that an earlier support ticket said the three domains would not be charged, and that $84 was charged anyway. The author asks Cloudflare to stop recurring charges, refund the $84 and answer Abuse request #23710600.
Reported amount · USD
$84
shmily7: a Durable Object alarm loop and a reported US$10,811.41 bill.
@shmily7 reports a Durable Object alarm loop in an unused test project, then says he paid the full US$10,811.41 bill to avoid service suspension. Cloudflare’s Ashley Peacock publicly says he is looking into it internally and will follow up. Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht later replies that he escalated it too. On October 9 the author declares the case closed: he reports that, with Ashley Peacock’s help, Cloudflare decided to refund the charges incurred during the bug in full, with the money still to arrive, and posts the support ticket reply he received.
Reported amount · USD
$10,811.41
calaudit.org: a $10 ACM charge, a $1.94 partial credit and a disputed $8.06 balance.
Community user calaudit.org says they were not aware of subscribing to Advanced Certificate Manager, asked in May 2026 for cancellation and a refund of the $10 charge, but received only a $1.94 partial credit. The remaining $8.06 balance is marked past due and blocks activating Log Explorer.
Reported amount · USD
$10
A simulation game, a reported $4,483.74 in Durable Object reads.
Jonathan Mann (@songadaymann) reports spending $4,483.74 on Durable Object reads while building a simulation game. Rita Kozlov replies, “let us see what we can do”; Mann thanks her, and she replies that she is DMing him for details.
Reported amount · USD
$4,483.74
mcwangcn reports $1,300 in D1 charges after a bot attack.
@mcwangcn says D1 writes previously cost over a thousand dollars and separately mentions Workers CPU charges without giving an amount. He later shares a Cloudflare bill and says $1,300 of its $3,600 came from D1 after a bot attack.
Reported amount · USD
$1,300
Independent. Unofficial. Source-first.
