How Much Does EmDash Cost to Run? (Free Limits Explained)
EmDash itself is free. Hosting on Cloudflare's free plan fits most small sites. Here are the real free limits, what pushes you to the $5 plan, and a sample yearly cost.
By the AstroBeginner team, reviewed by Seahawk MediaPublished 6 minute readComplete beginner
In this guide
EmDash is free. Where you pay, if you pay at all, is hosting. On Cloudflare’s free plan, most small sites cost nothing to run. Here are the real numbers, so you know where the line is.
The short answer
| Thing | Cost |
|---|---|
| EmDash itself | Free. It’s open source, MIT license. |
| Hosting on Cloudflare, small site | Free |
| A domain name | About $12 a year |
| Sandboxed plugins | $5 a month, the Workers Paid plan |
| Typical small site | About $12 a year |
What the free plan includes
An EmDash site on Cloudflare uses five pieces. Each has its own free allowance.
| Piece | What it does for EmDash | Free allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Workers | Runs your site | 100,000 requests a day |
| D1 | Your database | 5 million rows read and 100,000 written a day, up to 500 MB per database |
| R2 | Your images and files | 10 GB of storage a month, and downloads are always free |
| KV | Keeps you signed in | 100,000 reads and 1,000 writes a day |
| Images | Resizes pictures | 5,000 different resized images a month |
What does that mean for a real site? A request is roughly one page view. 100,000 a day is about 3 million page views a month. A blog with a few thousand visitors a month is nowhere near any of these.
What pushes you to the $5 plan
The Workers Paid plan is $5 a month for your whole Cloudflare account, not per site. You’d move to it for one of these:
- Sandboxed plugins. They need it. See EmDash plugins explained.
- More than five EmDash sites. Each one runs a small task every minute, for scheduled posts and upkeep. The free plan allows five of these tasks per account. The paid plan allows 250.
- A busy site. More than 100,000 requests a day, or pages that need more computer time than the free plan gives each request.
- Bigger databases. The paid plan raises the limit from 500 MB to 10 GB per database.
A sample year
| Free plan | Paid plan | |
|---|---|---|
| EmDash | $0 | $0 |
| Cloudflare | $0 | $60 |
| Domain | About $12 | About $12 |
| Total per year | About $12 | About $72 |
Compared with WordPress
A WordPress site needs a server running all the time. Cheap shared hosting starts around $3 a month, often more on renewal, and many sites add paid plugins for backups, security or speed. A typical small WordPress site runs $50 to $300 a year. An EmDash site of the same size usually fits in the free column above.
Hosting somewhere else
EmDash also runs on any server with Node.js, using SQLite for the database. Then you pay whatever that server costs. That can make sense if you already have one. For a new site, Cloudflare’s free plan is hard to beat.
Where to go next
- How to put EmDash online with Cloudflare.
- How much does an Astro website cost?, if you don’t need a dashboard at all.
Frequently asked questions
Is EmDash free?
Yes. EmDash is open source under the MIT license, so it costs nothing to use, for any kind of site.
When do I need to pay Cloudflare?
When you want sandboxed plugins, or when your site outgrows the free limits. The Workers Paid plan starts at $5 a month for your whole account.
How many EmDash sites can I run for free?
Up to five on one Cloudflare account, as long as each stays within the free limits. Each EmDash site uses one scheduled task, and the free plan allows five per account.
Stuck on a step?
Check the common errors guide, look up a word in the glossary, or ask the friendly people in the official Astro and EmDash Discords. How to ask so people can help.