How to deploy nodrix to Cloudflare: a free-tier setup guide

nodrix deploys with one click into your own Cloudflare account — Workers, Durable Objects, D1, R2, and KV, provisioned and built for you, with no server to host. Most people are up and running in a few minutes. Two things trip up first-timers, though, and both are easy to clear up: you need a Cloudflare account, and partway through the deploy Cloudflare asks for a credit card.

Neither one costs you anything for a normal setup. This guide walks the whole thing start to finish and explains exactly why that card prompt appears — because it’s the step that gets people worried they’re signing up for a bill, and they’re not.

What you’re actually deploying

The deploy drops a real, self-contained nodrix instance into your Cloudflare tenancy. It’s single-tenant: the resources, the data, and the billing are all yours. The project never touches your account. Here’s what gets created:

Every one of these runs on Cloudflare’s free plan. Keep that in mind when the card prompt shows up — none of this requires a paid plan to work.

Step 1 — Create a free Cloudflare account

If you already have one, skip ahead. If not:

1. Go to dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up.
2. Enter an email and a password.
3. Confirm the verification email Cloudflare sends.

That’s it — about two minutes, and no card is requested at signup. You now have a Cloudflare account on the free plan, which is all nodrix needs.

Step 2 — Run the one-click deploy

Hit Deploy to Cloudflare. Cloudflare takes over from there and walks you through a short flow:

1. Connect a Git account (GitHub or GitLab). Cloudflare creates a small repository in your account to hold the deployment config — this is how you’ll get updates later.
2. Provision the resources. Cloudflare creates the D1 database, the R2 bucket, the KV namespace, and the Durable Objects automatically. You don’t fill anything in.
3. Build and deploy. The build pulls the latest nodrix release and ships it to your Worker.

When it finishes, you get a *.workers.dev URL — that’s your live nodrix instance.

Step 3 — Why it asks for a card (and why it’s not a bill)

This is the screen that worries people. Somewhere in the flow, Cloudflare asks you to add a payment method, and it can look like you’re being pushed onto a paid plan. You’re not.

The reason is R2, Cloudflare’s object storage, where nodrix keeps your telemetry history. R2 is the one Cloudflare product that wants a payment method on file before it will switch on — even though its free tier covers far more than a maker deployment will ever use. Adding the card is account verification, not a charge:

• It is not a plan upgrade. Your account stays on the free plan.
• It is not a charge. Nothing is billed for staying inside the free allowance.
• It is required — R2 won’t activate without it, and nodrix needs R2 to store history.

Add the card (or PayPal), continue, and the deploy completes. You won’t see a charge appear.

What runs on the free plan, and how much room you get

Every service nodrix touches has a free tier, and they’re generous. Approximate free-plan limits at the time of writing — see Cloudflare’s pricing for the current numbers:

For context: a handful of devices each posting a reading every few seconds is a tiny fraction of those limits. The free tiers exist precisely for deployments this size.

Will I ever be charged?

Honestly: for a maker or small-team setup, no. The single thing that could eventually cost money is R2 storage — if you accumulated a very large volume of telemetry history, you could cross the 10 GB-month free mark. That’s a lot of data points, and it’s under your control through retention.

A couple of reassurances on the things people specifically worry about:

• Durable Objects. Cloudflare began billing for Durable Object SQLite storage in January 2026, but that applies only to Workers Paid accounts. Free-plan accounts are not charged for it.
• Egress. R2 has no egress fees, so reading your own telemetry back out never costs bandwidth the way S3 would.

If you want a hard guarantee, Cloudflare lets you set a billing notification so you’re alerted long before anything approaches a charge.

Step 4 — First boot

With the deployment live, open your *.workers.dev URL:

1. The first visit shows a Create owner account page. The first signup becomes the owner; after that, registration is closed and the owner invites everyone else.
2. Create a project and mint a project token from the dashboard.
3. Point a device at it — variables auto-create the moment data arrives:

curl -X POST https://<your-worker>.workers.dev/v1/telemetry \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NODRIX_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"metrics":{"temperature":23.4,"humidity":61}}'

A reading lands, a widget appears, and you’ve got a working IoT backend on infrastructure you own. For the device side in full — including getting commands back to the hardware — see Connect an ESP32 over HTTPS.

Staying up to date

Because the deploy created a repo in your Git account, updating is a one-click Retry build from the Cloudflare dashboard (Workers → your nodrix service), which pulls the latest release. nodrix also flags new versions for you under Settings → Version & updates and links you straight there.

The short version

• A Cloudflare account is free and takes two minutes; no card at signup.
• The deploy provisions everything for you and runs on the free plan.
• The card prompt is R2 verification, not a bill — add it and continue.
• A normal deployment lives well inside the free tiers, and you own all of it.