Rival AI Responding - Infrastructure Cost Report

Cloudflare Workers for Platforms + Durable Objects + ClickHouse Cloud · April 25 - May 16, 2026

$30
Monthly Base Cost
Workers Paid ($5) + Workers for Platforms ($25)
848K
Total Worker Requests
Across 22 days of development + scale testing
15,625
Survey Sessions
16 studies, including 15K+ scale test sessions across 2 studies
$0.00
Overage Charges
Zero. Every service within included tier.
Usage Breakdown by Service
ServiceMetricUsageIncluded in PlanOverage RateCost
Workers for Platforms Requests 848,313 20,000,000 /mo $0.30 per million $0.00
CPU time ~4.2% of included 60M CPU-ms /mo $0.02 per million ms $0.00
Durable Objects Requests ~410,000 1,000,000 /mo $0.15 per million $0.00
SQLite storage ~50 MB 5 GB $0.75 per GB-mo $0.00
Queues Messages ~610,000 1,000,000 /mo $0.40 per million $0.00
R2 Storage 224 KB 10 GB /mo $0.015 per GB-mo $0.00
Operations ~15,000 10M Class A /mo $0.36 per million $0.00
D1 Rows read ~30,000 25B rows /mo $0.001 per million $0.00
Storage 3.1 MB 5 GB $0.75 per GB-mo $0.00
ClickHouse Cloud Storage 19.3 MB Serverless tier (~$50/mo base) ~$50.00
Total Monthly Cost ~$80/mo
What This Paid For
MetricCountNotes
Studies published16Each deployed as isolated UserWorker + DO class
Survey sessions15,625Each with its own Durable Object + SQLite
Answers collected584,422Stored in DO SQLite + ClickHouse
Events tracked606,376card_answered, session_started, session_complete
Scale test: 100 concurrent100% pass56ms p50, 0 SSE drops
Scale test: 500 concurrent100% pass56ms p50, 0 SSE drops, burst mode
Scale test: 1000 concurrent100% pass56ms p50, 0 SSE drops, 300/wave
Scale test: 500 realistic (5 min)100% pass492 concurrent SSE held for 5+ min
Scale test: 500 realistic (coffee_habits)100% pass55ms p50, 500 concurrent SSE, schema-driven
Worker invocations (all time)848,313Across 22 days, 2 studies scale tested
Cost Per Survey Engagement
Based on actual usage: 848K requests for 15,625 sessions = ~54 requests per session average (varies by study size)
$0.00
Cost Per Response
All 15,625 sessions within included tier
$0.017
At Overage Rate
If every request were billed: 56 reqs × $0.30/M
$0.00
Per Response: Idle Cost
No traffic = no charge. $0 idle. Always.
Monthly Cost Breakdown
Rival AI Responding - Infrastructure
Workers Paid (base)$5/mo
Workers for Platforms (base)$25/mo
Durable Objects$0 (included)
Queues$0 (included)
R2 storage$0 (included)
D1 database$0 (included)
ClickHouse Cloud (serverless)~$50/mo
ETL pipeline$0 (not needed)
Load balancer / proxy$0 (CF edge handles it)
DevOps / monitoring$0 (serverless, no ops)
Total monthly~$80
$0 idle. Scales with usage. No ops.
Note: This cost does not include any AI/LLM costs (authoring, AI probes, voice interviews). Those are billed separately by the model provider.
Cost Projection at Scale
Based on ~56 worker requests per survey completion at $0.30 per million requests after 20M included
10 studies × 1,000 respondents
~$80
560K requests
Well within included tier
Zero overage
50 studies × 2,000 respondents
~$82
5.6M requests
Still within included tier
Zero overage
200 studies × 5,000 respondents
~$94
56M requests
36M over included
$10.80 overage
500 studies × 10,000 respondents
~$164
280M requests
260M over included
$78 overage
The Economics
15,625 survey sessions. 584,422 answers. 16 studies. Scale tested to 1,000 concurrent (burst) and 500 concurrent (realistic, 5+ min hold). Two different studies tested with a schema-driven framework - zero study-specific code. Total infrastructure cost: $80/month.

No servers to manage. No databases to scale. No ETL pipelines to maintain. No load balancers to configure. No idle costs. CPU-time billing means you pay for value delivered, not infrastructure reserved.

At 500 studies with 10,000 respondents each (5 million total completions per month), the total responding infrastructure cost would be approximately $164/month.

Note: This report covers responding infrastructure only. AI/LLM costs (for authoring, AI probes, voice interviews) are billed separately by the model provider and are not included in these figures.