How many builds do you get on the Cloudflare free plan?

500 Pages builds a month, shared across all the projects on your account, with 1 build running at a time.

Does the $5 Workers Paid plan give more Pages builds?

No. To raise the Pages build limit you need the Pro plan, which is about $20 a month.

Do preview deployments count toward the limit?

Yes. Every build counts, preview or production. That is why I turned previews off on most of my repos.

What happens to my site if I turn off preview deployments?

Nothing bad. Production still builds when you merge to main. You lose the separate preview link for each branch. Here is how I set that up.

What the Cloudflare free plan really gives you (build limits)

I host all my new sites on the Cloudflare free plan. It is part of how I build every website with Astro and Cloudflare. The hosting is free, but there is one limit that caught me out: builds.

The limits that matter

What	Free plan
Pages builds per month	500, shared across all projects
Builds at the same time	1

The key word is shared. If you have ten sites, they all draw from the same 500.

What happened to me

In September 2026 one site used 416 of 452 builds in a month. [ALI TO CONFIRM: what was the 452: the whole account's total that month? Which site was it, and why was it building so often?]

The part I could control was preview deployments. Cloudflare builds a preview every time you push a branch, and each one counts. [ALI TO CONFIRM: confirm that preview builds were the main cause]

What I did

I turned off preview deployments on that site and on many other repos. Production still builds every time I merge to main, so the live sites still update. The steps are in how to put an Astro site on Cloudflare Pages.

[ALI TO CONFIRM: how many builds a month you use now, after the change]

Why I did not just pay

To raise the build limit you need Cloudflare Pro, at about $20 a month. The cheaper Workers Paid plan ($5) does not raise it. I chose code fixes over paying for more capacity. For my sites, a preview link on every branch was not worth $20 a month.

Is the free plan enough?

For me, yes, once previews were off. It still costs me less than the Hostinger VPS I used to pay for. Here is why I moved off Hostinger. And if you are still choosing a framework, see why I use Astro.