Cloudsteading — own the tools you used to rent

Cloudsteading is a public build lab and open directory of small, owned, Cloudflare-native alternatives to expensive SaaS. Each entry maps a SaaS tool (Notion, Mailchimp, Pusher, Confluence, etc.) to a working build on Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, KV, Durable Objects, Workers AI, Queues, and other primitives — with source code, monthly cost estimates, and honest tradeoffs. 16 approved builds cover 25 SaaS targets across 15 Cloudflare primitives.

Most Cloudsteading builds are open source — every approved build links to its source repository, license, and a deployable architecture diagram. The directory itself is a single Cloudflare Workers app using D1, R2, KV, and Workers AI, and follows the same open patterns it documents.

For most small projects, yes. Cloudflare Workers gives 100,000 requests/day free, D1 includes 5GB of database storage free, R2 gives 10GB of object storage and free egress, and KV, Queues, Durable Objects, and Workers AI all have generous free tiers. Past the free limits, the Workers Paid plan is $5/month plus per-primitive usage. Most Cloudsteading builds run free or under $10/month at small-to-medium scale.

It varies per build, but the typical pattern is 10×–100× monthly cost reduction at small-to-medium scale. The SaaS bill that used to be $50–$500/month per tool collapses into Cloudflare's free tier or a $5/month Workers Paid plan. Each build entry lists its self-host monthly cost alongside the SaaS pricing it replaces, so you can compare directly.

The most common loadout is Workers (compute and routing), D1 (SQLite database), R2 (S3-compatible object storage), KV (low-latency key-value), Durable Objects (stateful coordination), Queues (background jobs), and Workers AI (inference). Most SaaS replacements need only 3–5 primitives. The /built-with index lists every primitive with the builds that use it.

Cloudsteading runs a public discovery queue at /discover where users vote yes/no on candidate replacements. The highest-voted builds get scheduled as live teardown episodes (visible at /changelog) and shipped as approved builds with full architecture write-ups.

Yes. Submit at /submit with the GitHub repo URL and the SaaS it replaces. Approved entries get a /projects/[owner]/[repo] page with the primitive loadout, cost estimate, architecture diagram, and inclusion in the directory feed and category/pattern indexes.