The Cost of Email at the Edge
Cloudflare Workers charge per-request, per-CPU-ms. We break down exactly what it costs to send 1 million emails on our architecture vs traditional containers.
One of the most common questions we get is: "How does edge-first infrastructure affect costs?" Here's the honest breakdown.
The traditional approach
A typical email SaaS runs on containers — ECS, Fargate, or similar. You need:
- At least 2 instances for high availability
- A load balancer
- A database for email metadata
- Redis for rate limiting
- A queue for async processing
Rough monthly cost for a small deployment: $800–$2,000/month — even if you're sending zero emails.
The edge-first approach
On Cloudflare Workers, you pay only for what you use:
- $0.30/million requests (Worker invocations)
- $0.012/million for subrequests ( SES API calls)
- $0.75/million for D1 rows read
- $5/million for D1 rows written
For 1 million emails/month, the Cloudflare infrastructure cost is roughly $15–$25/month — depending on payload sizes and database operations.
The comparison
| Volume | Containers | Edge-first | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10K/mo | ~$800 | ~$5 | 99% |
| 100K/mo | ~$1,200 | ~$12 | 99% |
| 1M/mo | ~$2,000 | ~$20 | 99% |
| 10M/mo | ~$5,000 | ~$150 | 97% |
The edge-first approach is dramatically cheaper because you're not paying for idle capacity. Every request is billed individually, and there are no always-on servers.
What this means for pricing
Lower infrastructure costs mean we can offer lower prices to you. Our overage pricing — from $0.50 to $0.90 per 1,000 emails depending on plan — includes healthy margins, because our costs are 97–99% lower than traditional approaches.
The free tier of 10,000 emails/month costs us pennies to run. That's why we can offer it with no strings attached.