AWS is a rental shop for computers and the managed services wrapped around them. Its pricing page lists EC2 on-demand Linux instances in us-east-1 at t4g.micro $0.0084 per hour, t3.micro $0.0104, t3a.micro $0.0094 and the older t2.micro $0.0116, all billed by the second, and the same account also sells managed Postgres, object storage, load balancers, queues and a global identity system. The company describes the portfolio as over 240 services, keeps 30-plus of them free within monthly usage limits, and credits new accounts with up to $200 to spend. The consequence of that breadth is that the monthly bill is a property of how you assemble the pieces rather than of a plan you chose.
TL;DR
AWS sells you computers: t4g.micro runs at $0.0084/hr and t3.micro at $0.0104/hr in us-east-1 on Linux, billed per second, inside an account that also holds managed Postgres, object storage, queues and IAM across 240+ services. Cloudflare sells you an outcome: the Free plan carries CDN, TLS and DDoS mitigation at $0, Pro costs $20/mo billed annually ($25 month-to-month) and adds the WAF, and Business jumps to $200/mo annually. Neither is a substitute for the other — AWS runs your application, Cloudflare sits in front of it. Pick AWS when you need servers and managed data services you configure yourself; pick Cloudflare when the problem is serving and defending traffic to something that already exists.
Cloudflare prices in plans instead. The Free tier carries CDN, TLS and DDoS mitigation at no charge; Pro is $20 per month billed annually or $25 month-to-month and adds a web application firewall for professional sites; Business is $200 annually or $250 monthly for business-critical traffic; Enterprise is sold through sales. Compute is billed separately and only while it runs, which the vendor contrasts with keeping servers warm. Its own network pages state coverage in 335+ cities, reach within 50ms of 95% of the world's internet-connected population, 310 billion threats blocked daily and that roughly 20% of the Internet runs through it.
The honest comparison is layered rather than either-or. A typical build puts AWS behind Cloudflare: EC2 or a managed service hosts the application, Cloudflare terminates the TLS, caches the static half and absorbs the junk traffic. Where they collide is the front of the stack — a marketing site, an API or a store that could live entirely on Cloudflare's platform will cost less and need less attention there, while anything with a database, background jobs or private network topology still needs an account like AWS underneath it.
| Feature | AWS | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | t4g.micro $0.0084/hr, t3.micro $0.0104/hr (us-east-1, Linux) | Free plan $0; Pro $20/mo billed annually, $25 month-to-month |
| Second tier | t2.micro $0.0116/hr; families priced per vCPU-hour and GiB | Business $200/mo billed annually, $250 month-to-month |
| Billing model | Pay-as-you-go, per second, no term commitment | Flat monthly plan plus metered platform services |
| Free offering | 30-plus services free within monthly limits, up to $200 credit | CDN, TLS and DDoS mitigation on the Free plan |
| What it hosts | VMs, managed databases, object storage, queues, serverless | Static sites, front ends and Workers at the edge |
| Network claim | Regions and availability zones selected per workload | Vendor states 335+ cities and 50ms reach to 95% of users |
| Top tier | Enterprise agreements negotiated through sales | Enterprise sold through sales with custom rules and support |
Pick AWS if
If the project needs a database with a schema, background jobs, a private subnet or an existing estate of internal services, AWS is the shorter path: you get the machine, the data layer and the identity system from one bill, and the per-second rates mean an unused t3.micro costs about the price of a coffee per week. Budget for the architecture rather than the instance, because the supporting resources are where the surprise usually sits.
Pick Cloudflare if
If the workload is a site, a store or a front end whose back end is already elsewhere, Cloudflare is the cheaper and simpler choice: the Free plan covers CDN, TLS and DDoS mitigation, and $20/mo on Pro adds the WAF that would otherwise be a separate purchase. You are buying a network and a security layer, not a computer, so anything that needs a server still has to live somewhere else.
No independent reviews, ratings or user quotes were collected for this page, so none appear above. Every figure and claim comes from the vendors' own pricing and product pages as retrieved for this article.
No. Cloudflare serves and defends traffic; it does not rent virtual machines or host a managed relational database. Teams typically run the application on a cloud account such as AWS and put Cloudflare in front of it.
Cloudflare's Free plan covers CDN, TLS and DDoS mitigation at $0, while any AWS architecture starts billing the moment resources exist. A simple static site has no reason to run a server, so the edge plan wins on price as well as on maintenance.
EC2 on-demand Linux instances in us-east-1 bill per second: t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr, t3.micro at $0.0104/hr and t2.micro at $0.0116/hr. Storage, load balancers and data transfer are metered separately from the instance.
Pro is $20/mo billed annually or $25 month-to-month and adds a web application firewall; Business is $200 annually or $250 monthly. Enterprise pricing is quoted by their sales team.
That is the common setup. DNS and the CDN live on Cloudflare, the origin sits in AWS, and the origin's security group is restricted to Cloudflare's ranges so traffic arrives through the edge rather than straight at the instance.
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