Cloudflare is best understood not as "a CDN" but as a programmable network that sits between your users and your origin, plus a growing platform for running code and storing data at the edge. For most developers the wins are real and immediate — free TLS, a fast global CDN, DNS you don't have to babysit, and a serverless runtime with almost no cold start. The catches are just as real: the Workers runtime isn't Node.js, some of the newer data products are still maturing, and aggressive defaults can cache or block things you didn't mean to. This post is the pros/cons breakdown I wish I'd had before I leaned on it in production.
What does Cloudflare actually give you for free?
The free tier is unusually generous, and it's why so many side projects start here. You get unproxied and proxied DNS, automatic TLS certificates, unmetered CDN bandwidth for cacheable assets, and basic DDoS protection that you don't configure. Point your domain's nameservers at Cloudflare, flip a record to "proxied" (the orange cloud), and your site is behind their network in a few minutes.
On top of that sits the developer platform:
Workers — JavaScript/TypeScript/WASM functions that run in V8 isolates at the edge. Because isolates aren't containers, startup is effectively instant, which sidesteps the cold-start problem you fight on traditional serverless.
