Cloudflare prices network access in plans. Free gives personal and hobby projects fast DNS, unmetered DDoS protection, the CDN and Universal SSL at $0. Pro costs $20 per month billed annually or $25 month-to-month and is aimed at professional websites, adding the full web application firewall, lossless image optimization and accelerated mobile pages. Business is $200 annually or $250 monthly, with a 100% uptime SLA carrying 1x service credits and PCI DSS 4.0 compliance; Contract is quoted annually and carries 10x or 25x credits. Workers compute sits outside the plans: 100,000 requests per day free, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU milliseconds.
TL;DR
Two plans, same price, different products. Cloudflare Pro is $20/mo billed annually ($25 month-to-month) and buys DNS, CDN, unmetered DDoS, Universal SSL and a full WAF for any host you point at it; the Free tier already covers the first four. Vercel Pro is $20/mo and buys a deployment pipeline with 10 million CDN requests and 1TB of transfer included, preview deployments and 40 custom firewall rules, on top of a Hobby tier that gives a million requests away. Cloudflare protects and caches whatever is already running; Vercel runs the front end for you. They are complements far more often than alternatives — the standard setup is Vercel behind Cloudflare.
Vercel prices a build and delivery pipeline. Hobby is free and includes a million CDN requests, 100GB of monthly data transfer, HTTPS certificates and three custom firewall rules — enough for a personal project. Pro is $20 per month and raises the included allowances to 10 million CDN requests and 1TB of transfer, with forty custom firewall rules, a hundred IP blocks, rate limiting that bills from $0.50 per million allowed requests, and preview deployments per branch. Enterprise is sold through sales, lifts the ceilings, allows up to a thousand firewall rules and comes with contractual support.
The confusion comes from the overlapping vocabulary: both mention CDN, firewall, TLS and global points of presence. The difference is where they sit. Cloudflare is in front of any origin — a WordPress host, a container, a SaaS app — and changes nothing about how that origin is built. Vercel is the origin for front ends: you connect a repository, it builds and serves the result, and the CDN is part of how it deploys. Buy both when you want Vercel's pipeline with Cloudflare's WAF and DNS at the edge; buy only one when the origin already exists or the app needs no build step.
| Feature | Cloudflare | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | DNS, unmetered DDoS, CDN, Universal SSL at $0 | 1M CDN requests, 100GB transfer, 3 firewall rules at $0 |
| Entry paid plan | Pro $20/mo billed annually, $25 monthly | Pro $20/mo: 10M requests, 1TB transfer included |
| Next tier | Business $200/mo billed annually, $250 monthly | Enterprise, quoted by sales |
| Web firewall | Full WAF from Pro, applies to any host | 40 custom rules on Pro, 100 on Enterprise, 1,000 top tier |
| What it fronts | Any origin: servers, SaaS, static hosts | Only sites deployed to Vercel |
| Deployments | None — it sits in front of existing deployments | Preview deployments and rollbacks per branch included |
| Compute | Workers: 100k requests/day free, then $0.30 per million | Functions metered through the plan's request allowance |
| Overage | Platform services billed separately from the plan | Requests from $2 per million, transfer from $0.15 per GB |
Pick Cloudflare if
If there is an origin — a host, a container, a SaaS app, a Vercel deployment — Cloudflare belongs in front of it. The Free tier handles DNS, CDN, TLS and DDoS at no cost, and $20/mo on Pro adds the WAF that would otherwise be a separate purchase with its own bill.
Pick Vercel if
If the deliverable is a repository that should become a live site with previews per branch, Vercel does that end to end. Hobby covers a million requests free, Pro covers ten million for $20, and the firewall, certificates and caching arrive configured rather than waiting for you to write them.
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.
Not strictly — Vercel includes HTTPS, caching and firewall rules on its plans. Teams add Cloudflare when they want DNS and WAF coverage for other hosts too, or when they prefer one place to manage every domain.
Only in price. Cloudflare's $20 (billed annually, $25 month-to-month) buys protection for any origin you point at it; Vercel's $20 buys a million-request-plus build pipeline for one platform. They answer different questions.
Both absorb spikes on the network side: Cloudflare with unmetered DDoS protection and a CDN, Vercel through its delivery network. Vercel also meters billing on requests and transfer, so a spike can raise the invoice, while Cloudflare's plan price is fixed for the WAF and CDN.
Yes. Point DNS at Vercel and proxy it through Cloudflare; the certificate chain and caching work normally. This is the most common reason the two appear together in a stack.
On Vercel Pro, CDN requests beyond the included 10 million bill from $2 per million and transfer beyond 1TB from $0.15 per GB. On Cloudflare, the plan price covers the CDN and WAF, while Workers and storage bill by usage: $0.30 per million requests is the Workers rate.
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