A flat, always-on home for apps that live in the edge's blind spot
Cloudflare's global edge is superb for delivering static frontends and serverless functions close to your users. Ruust is built for the other half of the stack: always-on backend containers with a persistent database, priced flat in GBP per Egg, with unmetered egress on every tier. No cold starts, no per-minute meter, no surprise bandwidth bill.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Both platforms are excellent at what they do, but they optimise for different shapes of app. Here is how Ruust's flat GBP pricing, unmetered egress and always-on containers line up against Cloudflare's usage-based edge model.
| Ruust | Cloudflare | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat GBP per Egg per month: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. | Usage-based across products, with generous free tiers, and priced in USD. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No bandwidth bill, ever. | A generous free tier, though some products tend to meter usage beyond allowances. |
| Cold starts | None. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, no scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | A serverless model can idle, and free tiers usually spin down after inactivity. |
| What you deploy | A long-running container from a git repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your Dockerfile). | Static frontends (Pages) and edge functions (Workers) rather than always-on containers. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your project. | Serverless data via D1, R2 and KV, oriented at the edge runtime. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other privately by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Edge-first model, so private service-to-service networking tends to work differently. |
| Global reach | Regional cells: eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, more coming. | A vast global edge network spanning many locations worldwide. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your Linux boxes, pull based. | Fully managed edge, so you do not run Cloudflare on your own metal. |
Cloudflare details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Cloudflare's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
Flat GBP pricing you can read off a page
An Egg costs the same every month, in pounds, in every region: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24, or a custom size on a slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB. Usage-based billing is a tax on being always-on, so a flat price means the invoice you approve is the invoice you get.
Unmetered egress, so no surprise bandwidth bill
Every tier ships with unmetered egress. Serve a viral launch, stream large responses or push a busy API and your bill does not move. Fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but there is no metering or cap on the volume you send.
Always-on with no cold starts
Ruust keeps every Egg warm 24 hours a day. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet spell is as fast as the last. That suits background workers, webhooks and small backend APIs that must simply always answer.
A full backend, not just the edge
Connect a repo and you are live on HTTPS in about two minutes, TLS issued in roughly 90 seconds and renewed automatically. Add managed Postgres or Redis Eggs with persistent volumes, private networking in a Coop, health checks, zero-downtime rolling deploys and horizontal replicas.
Where Cloudflare is the better fit.
An outstanding global edge network
Cloudflare tends to run one of the largest edge networks in the world, with points of presence in many locations. If your priority is serving content and running logic as close to every user as physically possible, that reach is hard to beat and Ruust's handful of regions will not match it.
Best-in-class static and serverless delivery
Pages and Workers are a genuinely excellent way to ship a static frontend and lightweight edge functions, usually with a very fast global rollout. For a JAMstack site or edge-native API, that model tends to be a strong and well-supported fit.
A broad, integrated product suite
Beyond compute, Cloudflare offers R2, D1, KV, a mature CDN, DDoS protection and a wide security and networking portfolio under one roof. If you want an edge-and-security platform with many building blocks that interlock, it is a compelling choice.
Ruust vs Cloudflare, the common questions.
Is Ruust a drop-in replacement for Cloudflare?
Not exactly, and often the two sit side by side. Cloudflare is strongest at edge delivery: static frontends and serverless functions close to users. Ruust hosts the always-on backend containers and databases behind them, at a flat GBP price with unmetered egress. Many teams put a frontend or CDN on Cloudflare and run the API and database on Ruust.
What does unmetered egress actually mean on Ruust?
It means there is no bill and no volume cap for the bandwidth your Eggs send out, on every tier. A traffic spike will not change your invoice. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps exist purely to stop abuse, but Ruust does not meter or charge for egress volume.
Do Ruust apps have cold starts like serverless functions?
No. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so requests after a quiet period respond immediately. That is the deliberate trade for an always-on model rather than a scale-to-zero one.
Can I run a database on Ruust rather than an edge datastore?
Yes. Ruust offers managed Postgres and Redis as database Eggs with a persistent volume, kept private to your project inside a Coop. You can also connect any external Postgres or MySQL by connection string if you already have one.