One terabyte of static traffic costs $205 through Azure Front Door and $0 on Cloudflare Workers

Front Door's figure can be rebuilt from its rate card. Counting a terabyte as 1,000 GB, the base fee plus 1,000 GB at $0.17 comes to $35 plus $170, or $205 ^[10]. Request fees are extra, so $205 is the lowest Front Door bill for that terabyte ^[8].

The other three Azure routes each start with 100 GB free or included ^[5][6][7]. At a terabyte, that allowance covers a tenth of the traffic and leaves 900 GB on the meter ^[26]. Static Web Apps Standard then comes to $9 plus 900 GB at $0.20, or $189 ^[11]. A Blob Storage static website with no CDN comes to about $78.30 ^[12]. The Free Static Web Apps plan has no overage, so a terabyte means upgrading ^[5].

Past the allowance, the per-gigabyte rate sets the bill ^[11][12]. "It isn't really about who has the bigger free tier. It's about what each platform decides to charge you for," the author wrote ^[14].

The numbers describe one workload: HTML, CSS and JavaScript ^[9], at public list prices checked in September 2026 for US regions, Azure East US and Zone 1 ^[2]. They transfer to a team whose traffic is mostly static files and whose rates are those list rates. The author came to the comparison after Azure left a custom domain, a web app and a resource group in a state that could not be deleted. That project moved to Workers ^[1].

Compute follows the same pattern of what gets metered. A call that waits 200 ms on a database and does 3 ms of work bills 3 ms of CPU on Workers ^[16]. The same call bills a full second of configured memory on Flex Consumption ^[27]. Workers isolates start in milliseconds, while Azure's on-demand instances can cold-start unless kept always ready ^[28]. One always-ready 512 MB Flex instance costs about $5.26 a month in baseline fees, against the $5 Workers Paid minimum ^[18]. "Both platforms end up charging about five dollars a month to stay awake," the author wrote ^[24]. For heavy, long-running jobs that need gigabytes of memory, the post sends the work to Azure ^[23].

Databases go the other way. D1's free plan is SQLite with 5M rows read and 100K rows written a day on 5 GB of storage ^[21]. Beyond Cosmos DB, Azure offers managed PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Redis with backups and replicas ^[22].

I think the Workers verdict holds for the project the post has in mind: a mostly static site with a few assets and traffic its owner hopes will grow ^[29]. The author sets the limit on that verdict at a project that is really a database with a website attached, where Azure's toolbox is far deeper ^[30].