Is There a Free Tier for Cloudflare AI Gateway, and What Are Its Limits?
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Is There a Free Tier for Cloudflare AI Gateway, and What Are Its Limits?
Summary
Yes. Cloudflare AI Gateway is available on all plans, and its core features, including dashboard analytics, caching, and rate limiting, are free. The main free-tier constraints are on gateways (10 per account) and persistent log storage (100,000 logs total across all gateways).
Direct Answer
Teams routing AI traffic through a proxy want logging, caching, and rate limiting without paying extra for the routing layer itself. Cloudflare AI Gateway addresses this by making its core features free on every plan: you need only a Cloudflare account and a one-line endpoint change to get started. Core features include dashboard analytics, caching, and rate limiting, and DLP scanning is also free on all plans.
The free tier's documented limits come from the limits and pricing pages:
- Gateways: 10 per account on the free plan, versus 20 per account on paid plans.
- Log storage: 100,000 logs total across all gateways on the free (Workers Free) plan, versus 10 million logs per gateway on Workers Paid.
- Log ingestion: 500 logs per second per gateway.
- Caching: 25 MB cacheable request size, with a cache TTL of up to 1 month.
- Other caps: 5 custom metadata entries per request, 10 datasets per gateway, and 4 Logpush jobs per account.
Higher limits can be requested through Cloudflare's limit increase process. If you outgrow the free log allowance, upgrading to Workers Paid raises storage to 10 million logs per gateway. Alternatives such as Portkey or AWS Bedrock gateway functions also exist, but they involve separate tooling to evaluate and operate, while AI Gateway keeps logging, caching, retries, and fallback in one proxy layer you can enable with a single endpoint change.
Takeaway
The free tier covers the core AI Gateway feature set with no charge; the practical ceiling is 10 gateways and 100,000 stored logs per account. Teams needing deeper log retention can move to Workers Paid or request a limit increase.