The egress fee is the oldest trick in the cloud. You upload for free and pay the day you want your data back. Cloudflare went straight for it on day one of its birthday week, with three products at once.
Fact
The facts: on 1 October 2026 Cloudflare announced three things. Basin, known until now as Cloudflare Data Platform, is generally available: an open serverless data platform on Apache Iceberg and R2, with no egress fees. Three parts: Basin Pipelines receives events from Workers, HTTP or Logpush, transforms them with SQL and writes them as Iceberg tables or files in R2, at up to 3 GB/s per stream; Basin Catalog manages Iceberg metadata and maintains the tables itself; Basin SQL is a serverless, distributed SQL engine with more than 190 functions. You are billed only when Basin ingests, processes or queries. Per Cloudflare, users created tens of thousands of Pipelines during the beta. K2 is a serverless event streaming service on R2, in public beta for Workers Paid plans: up to 10 GB of storage and 30 MB/s produce per stream, about 1 second of produce latency at the 99th percentile. Support for Apache Kafka clients is on the roadmap. Cloudflare states the prices it anticipates after the beta: $0.04 per GB produced, $0.04 per GB consumed and $0.02 per GB per month retained; the beta is not billed. Workers KV Instant is in private beta: a new KV mode on Quicksilver, Cloudflare's internal key-value store from 2020. Per the company, p99 reads are 1.62 ms against 287 ms in classic mode, and writes reach more than 300 locations with a median of 107 ms and 256 ms at the 99th percentile. Prices: $0.20 per million reads, $0.10 per write, delete or list operation, $100 per MB per month. Limits: up to 10,000 keys, up to 1 MB per namespace, one write per second per namespace.
Basin is the big one. If you keep data in S3 and ask it questions with Athena, you know the bill: every time it leaves, you pay. Cloudflare promises zero egress and quotes a customer who replaced exactly that pair. The customer is their quote, on their blog.
K2 is more modest. A stream on R2, a 10 GB cap in beta and no Kafka clients today. If you already run Kafka, you wait. If you are starting clean, you get a cheap log that you do not have to administer.
Zero egress is the door. Paid ingestion is the rent.
KV Instant wants to be read slowly. $100 per megabyte per month and $0.10 per write are prices for configuration, not for data. A flag, a route, a key: write once, read millions of times, and the change reaches the whole network in a quarter of a second. That is what it is for. Put sessions or a catalogue in there and the invoice will teach you fast.
If you have Pipelines from the beta, you are already on Basin and nothing changes. If you are only looking now, the number that tells the truth arrives with the first invoice.
Official primary sources
Cloudflare - Cloudflare Basin, 01.10.2026Cloudflare - Cloudflare K2, 01.10.2026Cloudflare - Workers KV Instant, 01.10.2026The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.