Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.
Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.
I had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".
About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps.
I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.
> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.
Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.
This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.
I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.
% npx wrangler deploy --temporary
wrangler 4.103.0
────────────────────
You must accept Cloudflare's Terms of Service (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/) in order to continue. By typing "yes", you agree to these terms. Type "yes" to continue. … yes
Solving proof-of-work challenge…
Temporary account ready:
Account: Educated Celery (created)
Claim within: 60 minutes
Claim URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/claim-preview?claimToken=CAVe7LzWiGad-redacted
Total Upload: 13.79 KiB / gzip: 4.12 KiB
Uploaded cloudflare-redirect-resolver (2.27 sec)
Deployed cloudflare-redirect-resolver triggers (0.50 sec)
https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers.dev
Current Version ID: 5c12da7f-2749-4ccc-a8f6-79b85da98d10
> I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am
as far as i’m aware, that’s fully binding and often an accepted practise - take Minecraft’s server software, where you must accept the EULA with a text flag before running
Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.
Lets keep in mind this is cloudflare workers runtime - it only makes sense to deploy small things there, maybe static sites. Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch, asking it to „now deploy to cloudflare” will fail so bad.
This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…
I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?
quick piece of feedback, the workers architecture is a little bit annoying when converting from Lambda but hooking up to cloudflare MCP solves 90% of the issues
> simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.
I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a "lockin" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration.
> You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store).
Instead, if you mean accessing these resources from containers, it's a bit clunky [0] but it's there - you should be able to access worker bindings from containers through those outbound handlers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.
If I want to onboard a client to Cloudflare, I have to ask them to create an account and then invite me, which is a lot of friction for non-technical people.
A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.
Cloudflare makes it really hard to spend money. I constantly have to talk to someone in sales to enable some feature after rounds of negotiating on price. I think they would have way more customers, spending much more money, if they just offered transparent pricing, and fully on-demand services.
I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!
Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.
Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.
I had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".
First you spread the disease, then you sell the cure.
I think this is more of a “keep friends close but enemies closer” type thing.
Sounds more like “let’s make money twice”.
But think of the shareholders
Anyone can be a shareholder.
Said the rich swe, fully oblivious of many who struggle to feed their own children.
I thought there were no rich swes anymore?
Cloudflare is in the S&P500. If you have a 401k diversified in broad market indexes then most likely… you are a shareholder.
About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
and sitll the US seems to be one of the biggest markets educated on "being a shareholder" im sure Europe has smaller percentage of them.
That's unnecessarily presumptuous.
It's a clean way to charge AI to read content too.
Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps.
I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.
The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...
Hot damn...
> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.
Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.
This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.
I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.
I just tried this out:
I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am, but it did work - https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers... will be live for the next 59 minutes.> I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am
as far as i’m aware, that’s fully binding and often an accepted practise - take Minecraft’s server software, where you must accept the EULA with a text flag before running
You might want to claim the link or remove it
I redacted it, but if anyone still has at and wants to steal my demo app they're welcome to it.
Why?
Why not
Wasn’t this case pretty much before?
The limits are 100 workers on free and 500 on paid.
And if need more then you can always go their platform which supports tenancy.
As long as you have a cronjob or similar to clean up the cost of having per PR preview is pretty much zero.
unless you have 500 PR's a day =)
On the other hand, we already use regular CF builds for frontend previews, but that doesnt solve a fullstack PR preview much
Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...
Given how little they do now to stop malicious content hosted behind/by Cloudflare, the bare minimum if anything.
> Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content
If it helps laugh DDoS attacks they would be incentivized to do the exact opposite. They can charge more for “protection” then.
Lets keep in mind this is cloudflare workers runtime - it only makes sense to deploy small things there, maybe static sites. Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch, asking it to „now deploy to cloudflare” will fail so bad.
This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…
> Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch
The latest models appear to know CF Workers inside out and are very capable of doing that if you ask them to.
Here's my GPT-5.5 xhigh + Codex Desktop transcript building one just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/264bd6b8a39fc34c91c9c867454c6... - code here: https://github.com/simonw/cloudflare-redirect-resolver
> it only makes sense to deploy small things there
What makes you say that?
> Make snail-game in Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and deploy it using wrangler, don't ask me questions, do the best you can
https://snail-game.solstice-barometer.workers.dev/
pretty cool.
If eastdakota/jgc are here.
- simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.
- You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".
- workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.
Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)
I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...
quick piece of feedback, the workers architecture is a little bit annoying when converting from Lambda but hooking up to cloudflare MCP solves 90% of the issues
there's absolutely nothing positive we want to encourage copying from AWS's architectural approach to anything.
chuckles
> simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.
I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a "lockin" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration.
> You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store).
Instead, if you mean accessing these resources from containers, it's a bit clunky [0] but it's there - you should be able to access worker bindings from containers through those outbound handlers.
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform-detail...
>Not having a simple container based compute piece made me hesitate in taking up CF
Agreed. I wish CF had something like Azure's new fast-starting Express containers.
Wouldn't it make more sense to merge the temporary account into an existing one, instead of claiming it as a new account?
This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.
I assumed that's how it works if you sign in before claiming the account?
It says to claim you can either sign up or sign in.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.
If I want to onboard a client to Cloudflare, I have to ask them to create an account and then invite me, which is a lot of friction for non-technical people.
A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.
Cloudflare makes it really hard to spend money. I constantly have to talk to someone in sales to enable some feature after rounds of negotiating on price. I think they would have way more customers, spending much more money, if they just offered transparent pricing, and fully on-demand services.
I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!
posted yesterday as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598906
I’m going to need a wrapper for all these services offering this service.