What Express actually costs to run

The period we measured

Primo Round’s own Express instance, 9 May to 10 August 2026. Six internal senders, daily use on heavy files (event footage), no test environment.

What actually landed on the invoice

Cloudflare bills on a monthly cycle. These are the three invoices for the period, real amounts:

A note on the first invoice. $9.00 of that $9.01 is a configuration mistake of ours, not consumption: we had switched on a lifecycle rule moving objects to the Infrequent Access storage class, where operations carry no included allowance and billing rounds up to the million. Three operations were billed as one million. Rule removed, default class back to Standard. Actual usage cost for the three months was $2.90 — 97 cents a month. We write it down because it is exactly the kind of thing a customer discovers on the bill when someone else did the configuration.

Why the bill is this small

On Cloudflare R2 the line items that could cost something are, in this usage profile, zero:

With 16 MB upload chunks, the included million write operations is roughly 16 TB uploaded per month before operations start costing anything. For nearly every corporate use, that line stays at zero.

The formula

At these volumes everything else is noise. Monthly infrastructure cost is, in practice:

(average GB kept − 10) × $0.015

It does not depend on how many people send, it does not depend on how many people receive, and it does not depend on gigabytes downloaded. It depends on how much data you keep online, and for how long.

Find your bracket

Pass-through Cloudflare costs, in dollars, by average volume of data kept on the instance:

Download traffic is absent from this table because it is absent from the invoice: you can serve the same file to a thousand people without the amount moving by a cent.

How to estimate your own volume

The number to find is not “how much do I send each month” but “how much stays online”. It comes from two things you decide: monthly volume sent and retention window.

At steady state, data kept tends towards monthly volume × months of retention. 30 GB a month kept for six months is roughly 180 GB stored: $2.55 a month. The same 30 GB kept for two years is roughly 720 GB: $10.65 a month.

That is the only lever worth thinking about, and it is why in Express expiry closes the link but does not delete the file: two separate decisions, and you make the second one knowing what it costs.