groundflare-estimate

Compare your Cloudflare Workers bill against a self-hosted VPS — in one command.

npx groundflare-estimate

Answer a handful of prompts about your workload (requests per month, CPU time, D1/KV/R2 footprint, Durable Object count), and this tool prints a side-by-side cost comparison against a right-sized Hetzner Cloud VPS. No account, no sign-up, no data leaves your machine.

Example output:

+------------------------------------------------------+
|                 groundflare estimate                 |
|         Workload profile: C (compute-heavy)          |
|                   Confidence: low                    |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Current Cloudflare                         $29.89/mo |
|   Workers Paid base                            $5.00 |
|   Workers request overage                     $12.00 |
|   Workers CPU-ms overage                       $4.40 |
|   D1                                           $7.63 |
|   R2                                           $0.86 |
|                                                      |
| Target: Hetzner CX42                       $17.00/mo |
|   VPS (cx42, 8 vCPU / 16 GB)                  $14.00 |
|   Backups (restic → B2)                        $3.00 |
| Savings: $12.88/mo ($154.56/yr, 43%)                 |
| Prices: 2026-04-14                                   |
|   hetzner: live (2026-04-15)                         |
+------------------------------------------------------+

Why this is a separate package

groundflare-estimate is the "should I even bother self-hosting my Workers?" conversation — packaged as a stand-alone tool so you can answer that question without installing the full groundflare CLI.

• Marketing hook — anyone curious about CF costs can npx groundflare-estimate in ~5 seconds
• Independent release cycle — pricing changes ship as new versions of this package, not new versions of the CLI
• Reusable library — the groundflare CLI imports from here; future web UIs and Slack bots can too

Install and run

Zero-install (recommended — always uses the latest version):

npx groundflare-estimate

Global install:

npm install -g groundflare-estimate
groundflare-estimate

As a library:

npm install groundflare-estimate

import {
  computeEstimate,
  loadBakedPrices,
  renderEstimate,
  refreshPrices,
  EnvSecretReader,
  type Usage,
} from 'groundflare-estimate'

const usage: Usage = {
  requestsPerMonth: 20_000_000,
  cpuMsPerRequest: 5,
  avgResponseKB: 50,
  d1StorageGB: 2,
  d1ReadsPerMonth: 10_000_000,
  // ...
}

const baked = loadBakedPrices()
const { prices, sources } = await refreshPrices({
  baked,
  secrets: new EnvSecretReader(),   // reads HCLOUD_TOKEN from env
})
const estimate = computeEstimate(usage, prices, { confidence: 'high', priceSources: sources })
console.log(renderEstimate(estimate))

Flags

| Flag | Effect | |---|---| | --no-live | Skip the live Hetzner refresh; use only the baked-in price table. | | --json | Emit the full Estimate object as JSON to stdout, for piping into other tools. | | -h, --help | Print usage. |

Pricing data

Two layers, baked-in fallback + live refresh when possible:

1. Baked table — src/prices.ts ships with the package, populated from CF + Hetzner's published pricing pages. Used unconditionally when there's no API token or when the live fetch fails.
2. Live refresh — if you set HCLOUD_TOKEN (or GROUNDFLARE_HETZNER_TOKEN), the tool calls Hetzner's /v1/pricing on each run and merges the fresh numbers over the baked table. cx22-cx52 monthly prices and traffic overage rates are refreshed; vcpu/ram_gb/disk_gb stay from the baked spec (they don't come back from /v1/pricing, but they're stable catalog info).

Failure modes are never fatal: a network hiccup, wrong token, or schema surprise falls back to baked with a note at the bottom of the output.

Currency

Baked USD; Hetzner API serves EUR. We convert live EUR → USD with a fixed 1.07 rate. Fine for a cost comparison that's labelled as an estimate; don't use this for accounting.

Cloudflare side — always baked

Cloudflare has no customer-facing pricing API, so CF prices are only updated when the package is re-released. Check the updated field at the bottom of the output to see the table's age; a warning fires when it's over 90 days old.

Algorithm outline

1. Classify the workload as profile A (typical micro-SaaS), B (media-heavy), C (compute-heavy), or D (data-heavy), based on egress / CPU / D1 usage.
2. Size a VPS: compute cores × peak_rps × cpu_ms × 1.5 for compute headroom; add RAM for Durable Object instances; add disk with 2× growth headroom for SQLite WAL. Pick the smallest Hetzner tier that fits.
3. Cost both sides line-by-line. CF uses Workers Paid tiers + D1/KV/R2/DO metered overage. Hetzner uses tier monthly + egress overage + recommended restic → B2 backups. Profile B adds an optional Bunny CDN cost.
4. Warn about anything that can't be migrated (Workers AI, Browser Rendering, Vectorize, Hyperdrive) so the user keeps the right bindings on CF.

See design/cost-estimate.md in this repo for the full spec, including the v0.2+ roadmap (CF billing CSV parser, CF Analytics API live fetch, shareable links).

Confidence levels

• high — all inputs from the CF Analytics API or a billing CSV. v0.3+ feature; not wired yet.
• medium — some inputs estimated. v0.2+.
• low — current default from the interactive prompt. Users guess most fields, so the estimate is a ballpark, not an invoice.

Non-goals

• Not a migration executor — only produces the comparison; run groundflare deploy to actually move workloads.
• Not a benchmark — use groundflare bun analyze and friends for perf work.
• Not a tax / accounting tool — the currency conversion is a constant, not a live FX feed.

Roadmap

| Version | Scope | |---|---| | v0.1 (current) | Interactive prompt, Hetzner target only, baked + live hybrid pricing, terminal + JSON output. | | v0.2 | CF billing CSV input, --profile override, DigitalOcean / Linode / Vultr targets. | | v0.3 | CF Analytics API live usage fetch, higher confidence. | | v0.4 | Shareable link landing page (groundflare.dev/e/:id). |

License

MIT. See LICENSE.