Cloudflare Tutorial: Deploy a Vibe-Coded App on the Free Tier, Step by Step

TL;DR: To ship a vibe-coded app, you need three things: an address, a data store, and a backup. This post walks through the order: buy a domain on Cloudflare, deploy with Pages and connect the domain, store data in D1, and back it up to R2, with free-tier limits along the way. It’s for anyone who built an app but hasn’t decided where to put it.

Contents

1. Three things that get stuck when you ship a vibe-coded app
2. Buy the domain first
3. Cloudflare products and what they do
4. Deployment order
5. Asking AI to run it through the CLI
6. When the free tier runs short
7. When you get stuck
8. What to keep after deploying

Ask an AI to build an app and the screens come together quickly. The next questions are where things get stuck: what address will the app open at, where do you keep the data users leave behind, and what do you restore it from if it disappears? I once wrote this in a Threads post:

If you want to vibe-code, remember Cloudflare. Database, domain, backup, connection, and so on: the free tier is already enough.

(Threads post by @buildnwrite, September 10, 2026)

This post walks through that idea step by step. I checked the limits and menu names against the official docs on October 5, 2026.

1. Three things that get stuck when you ship a vibe-coded app

To let other people use an app that only runs on your computer, three things need to be added.

What you need	What happens without it	Cloudflare product
Address	No link to share with others	Registrar (domains), Pages
Data storage	Nowhere to keep user input	D1
Backup	No way to recover if data is deleted	R2

On Cloudflare, you can attach all three within one account. I have one experience with the backup row. My home server is a single Mac mini, and Claude suggested R2 because I needed a backup server. I was a bit uneasy about my backup strategy, and that suggestion made me feel more secure.

2. Buy the domain first

The first step in the deployment order is buying a domain. Here is the original Threads post:

For anyone deploying what they vibe-coded, I want to strongly recommend not using a Vercel domain and buying one domain for KRW 10,000/year instead!

(Threads post by @buildnwrite, September 8, 2026)

Registrar is the Cloudflare product where you buy domains. The Registrar product page says Cloudflare charges only the amount that the registry and ICANN collect, with no markup.

• Prices vary by domain extension, so check them on the purchase screen.
• Check which extensions you can buy from Cloudflare in the supported domain list docs first. The docs say extensions that don’t appear in search results can’t be registered.
• To attach the root domain itself (example.com) to Pages, you have to move that domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare. If you only attach a subdomain like app.example.com, you don’t need to move them.

3. Cloudflare products and what they do

I use Cloudflare for my other infrastructure too, and the free tier is more than enough for me. Five products come into play when shipping one vibe-coded app. Free limits are based on the official docs.

Product	What it does	Free limits (October 5, 2026)	Official docs
Registrar	Buy and renew domains	Not free; sold at cost	Registrar
Pages	Deploy the UI (static files)	Unlimited static file requests, 500 builds per month	Pages limits
Workers	Run server code	100,000 requests per day	Workers pricing
D1	Database	500MB per database, 5GB per account, 5 million rows read per day, 100,000 rows written per day	D1 limits
R2	File storage (backup)	10GB storage per month, free egress	R2 pricing

When you open the Pages limits doc, the build limits are at the top.

• Builds run one at a time and stop with a timeout after 20 minutes. Concurrent builds are counted per account.
• Pages rebuilds every time you push new code to the Git repository. Frequent commits use up your build count quickly.
• You can attach up to 100 domains to a single project.

4. Deployment order

Connect the five pieces in this order. Connecting a domain requires an existing Pages project, so it comes after deployment.

Here are the menus you click at each step.

1. Buy the domain. Buy it from Registrar. At this stage, just purchase it.
2. Deploy to Pages. Upload your app’s build output folder (usually dist) and a project-name.pages.dev address is created. If you connect a Git repository, it redeploys automatically every time you push code.
3. Connect the domain. In the dashboard, open Workers & Pages, select the project, and click Custom domains > Set up a domain (official docs). The pages.dev address keeps working after you connect your domain.
4. Connect D1. After creating the database, link it in the Pages project under Settings > Bindings > Add > D1 database bindings. After linking, you have to redeploy for the change to take effect (official docs).
5. Back up to R2. Export the D1 contents to a file and upload it to an R2 bucket. The commands are in section 5.

5. Asking AI to run it through the CLI

You can click through the steps above one at a time in the dashboard. An easier route is to install wrangler and have an AI coding tool run the commands. The official docs describe wrangler as the CLI for Cloudflare’s developer platform.

To install, run npm i -D wrangler@latest in your app folder, then confirm with npx wrangler --version (install docs). The step-by-step commands are below. Replace the text inside angle brackets with your own names.

npx wrangler login                                            # First time only: connect your account in the browser
npx wrangler pages project create <project-name>              # Create a Pages project
npx wrangler pages deploy dist --project-name=<project-name>  # Upload the build folder
npx wrangler d1 create <database>                             # Create a D1 database
npx wrangler d1 export <database> --remote --output=backup.sql
npx wrangler r2 bucket create <bucket>                        # Create a backup bucket
npx wrangler r2 object put <bucket>/backup.sql --file=backup.sql --remote

You can ask the AI something like this: “Deploy this app to Pages using wrangler, create a D1 database, and connect it. Show me every command you run.” Including that last sentence lets you check which commands the AI actually ran.

6. When the free tier runs short

Here are the free and paid limits from the official docs side by side. Workers Paid and Cloudflare Pro are separate paid products.

Item	Free	Paid
Server code requests	100,000 per day, resets at 9 a.m. Korea time (UTC midnight)	Workers Paid (minimum $5/month per account): 10 million requests per month included; beyond that, $0.30 per 1 million requests
D1 storage	500MB per database, 5GB per account	Workers Paid: 10GB per database
D1 restore	Last 7 days	Workers Paid: last 30 days
Pages builds	500 per month, one at a time	Cloudflare Pro plan: 5,000 per month

• Requests for static files are unlimited, but server code requests in Pages count toward the Workers limit of 100,000 per day (official docs). Code that calls D1 falls into this bucket.
• On the free plan, D1’s restore feature (Time Travel) can’t roll back further than 7 days (official docs). To keep history longer than that, back up separately to R2.
• Workers Paid minimum fees and request pricing are based on the Workers pricing docs. D1 capacity is based on the D1 limits docs.

7. When you get stuck

I’ve only listed symptoms that the official docs describe.

Symptom	Cause	What to do
522 error when opening your domain	A record pointing to the Pages address was added manually in the domain settings before connecting the domain in Pages	Connect the domain from Custom domains first
example.com won’t connect	The nameservers are not Cloudflare’s	Change the nameservers where you bought the domain
1027 error page	Workers daily request limit exceeded (when configured to show an error once the limit is passed)	Wait for the UTC midnight reset, or upgrade to a paid plan
Data save fails, limit-exceeded error	D1 daily read or write limit exceeded	Wait until the next day, or upgrade to a paid plan
Cannot insert data	D1 storage limit reached (500MB per database, 5GB per account)	Delete data you don’t need

• Sources: domain connection docs, Workers limits docs, D1 pricing docs, D1 limits docs
• The domain connection docs also say that if you remove a domain connection from Pages and add it back, activation will be slower.

8. What to keep after deploying

In a Threads post listing five reasons vibe-coded apps don’t make money, I wrote points 1 and 5 like this:

Telling people is a million times harder than building. / Once you deploy, keep one of three things: experience, data, or money. Each one is harder than the last.

(Threads post by @buildnwrite, September 20, 2026)

Once you’ve deployed, do these two things:

• Send your domain address to one person and ask them to confirm it actually opens.
• Use the export command from section 5 to make a D1 backup file and leave it uploaded to R2.

If the next step is adding login to your app, see the vibe-coding Supabase login guide. If Supabase keys confuse you, see the Supabase keys guide. If the word “server” is unfamiliar, read what is a server first.

Free limits, menu names, and commands are based on Cloudflare’s official docs as of October 5, 2026. Before paying, check each product’s pricing docs again.