ADR-0001: Cloudflare over Vercel

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-07-30
Supersedes: —
Superseded by: —

Context

The project must run at £0 at launch, with web and mobile from day one, and a credible path to earning money later. Vercel and Cloudflare are the two obvious hosts.

Decision

Host the API, web app and docs site on Cloudflare.

Rationale

Vercel’s Hobby tier is restricted to personal, non-commercial use. The moment the project earns anything, even indirectly, it breaches the terms and requires Pro at $20/seat/month. Hobby also has no overage behaviour — hitting a limit pauses the deployment until the billing cycle resets.

Cloudflare’s free tier carries no commercial-use restriction, and the upgrade cliff is $5/month rather than $20/seat.

Consequences

Slightly rougher initial setup, accepted in exchange for terms that don’t need renegotiating on the day the project succeeds.
The Workers runtime constraints become project-wide constraints — notably the 10ms CPU per invocation ceiling on the free tier. See ADR-0004 and docs/standards/engineering-standards.md.
Forces ADR-0002: Next.js on Cloudflare needs the OpenNext adapter.

Alternatives considered

Vercel Hobby → Pro. Better DX and a smoother Next.js path, rejected on the commercial-use clause and the $20/seat cliff.