---
title: "Cost"
description: "What an install costs on Cloudflare, with the rates, the cost of one wake, and a comparison with always-on and a VM."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://oc-workers.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Cost

Figures are US dollars from the project's cost model and test runs. They are estimates until your first invoice. Check [Cloudflare Containers pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform/pricing/) for current rates.

## What you pay

| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Workers Paid plan | $5 a month. Containers need it. |
| Container, 2 vCPU, 6 GiB, 20 GB, awake | About $0.06 to $0.07 an hour |
| Container, asleep | No compute charge. Snapshot storage applies. |
| Snapshot storage | Unknown. Cloudflare has not published a price. |
| Model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on Workers AI | About $0.0004 a turn warm, $0.004 to $0.008 cold (13,000 token prompt) |
| R2 bucket | Inside the free amounts at this size |

Included allowances, such as container hours and Durable Object requests, lower the bill. The cost model ignores them, so its figures are an upper bound.

## Per month

| Use | Sleep mode (default) | Always-on |
|---|---|---|
| Light use, Telegram and Control UI | About $7 to $14 | Not needed |
| Same, if snapshot storage is priced high | Up to about $25 | Not needed |
| A channel that needs a socket | Not possible | About $50 to $69 |
| For comparison, a small VM (Hetzner CX33) | About $10 to $12 | About $10 to $12 |

The VM figure adds about 20% for backups (an estimate). When we read Hetzner's page in October 2026, it showed every plan as unavailable.

The cost model's default profile is a proactive check every 2 hours from 08 to 22, plus 10 Telegram chats a day. On that profile, sleep mode costs $10.55 with the lowest snapshot price guess, $12.37 with a middle guess and $24.72 with a high guess. Always-on costs $50.25 to $68.53 in the same model, and about $58 once you add R2 operations and 10% idle CPU.

## Per wake

| Event | Cost |
|---|---|
| One cron wake | About $0.0055 |
| One Telegram chat wake | About $0.0117 |
| One Control UI session | About $0.0219 |
| One awake hour | About $0.0612 |
| One sleep, snapshot storage | $0.0015 (low guess) to $0.024 (high guess) |

In test runs, the measured cost of a wake was 1.05 times the model for a cron wake and 1.18 times for a chat wake.

## See your own cost

- Run `ochost status` to see the cost range for your install. A new install shows one value until it has history.
- Open the owner console. The state card shows the projected month. The Overview tab shows the month at the last 24 hours' pace, the always-on month, the percent saved and the cost guard.

## Cost guard

The install does not sleep when the last 24 hours plus one more sleep and wake cycle would cost more than always-on. To turn this off, set `sleep.costGuard` to `off`. See [Configuration](https://oc-workers.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/configuration/#sleep-keys).

## Against a VM

At the defaults, a VM costs about the same, and it is cheaper if you chat a lot. Above about 10 Telegram sessions a day, or 5.5 Control UI sessions a day, a bare CX33 is cheaper than oc-workers. If you must run a socket channel all the time and only price matters, a VM with backups is about 4 to 5 times cheaper.

Over a VM, oc-workers adds a one-command install, webhook acknowledgement at the edge while the install sleeps, backups and managed upgrades.

## Next

Go to [State and backups](https://oc-workers.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/state-and-backups/).

Source: https://oc-workers.mdick85.workers.dev/docs/cost/index.mdx