Cloudflare R2

User uploads, generated images, PDFs, database dumps: none of them belong in Postgres, and serving them from your app container is how a $5 host becomes a $50 one. R2 is object storage that speaks the S3 API, so every existing SDK and tool works — and it charges nothing for egress, at any volume, on any plan.

That last part is the whole argument. On S3 the bill scales with how popular your files are; on R2 it scales with how many you keep.

Free tier link

No expiry and no trial conversion. Past 10 GB it’s about $0.015 per GB-month, and egress stays free.

Create a bucket link

Cloudflare dashboard → R2 → Create bucket, then Manage R2 API Tokens for an access key pair. Or from the CLI:

  npm install -g wrangler
wrangler login
wrangler r2 bucket create my-app-uploads
wrangler r2 object put my-app-uploads/hello.txt --file ./hello.txt
  

The S3 endpoint is https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com, and the region string is auto.

  aws s3 ls s3://my-app-uploads \
  --endpoint-url https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
  

Upload from your app link

Do not proxy file bytes through your own server — that burns the compute you’re paying for and caps you at the host’s request size limit. Instead have the server sign a URL and let the browser upload straight to R2.

  npm install @aws-sdk/client-s3 @aws-sdk/s3-request-presigner
  

  import { S3Client, PutObjectCommand } from "@aws-sdk/client-s3";
import { getSignedUrl } from "@aws-sdk/s3-request-presigner";

const r2 = new S3Client({
  region: "auto",
  endpoint: `https://${process.env.R2_ACCOUNT_ID}.r2.cloudflarestorage.com`,
  credentials: {
    accessKeyId: process.env.R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
    secretAccessKey: process.env.R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
  },
});

// server: hand the browser a URL that is valid for five minutes
export async function uploadUrl(key, contentType) {
  return getSignedUrl(
    r2,
    new PutObjectCommand({ Bucket: "my-app-uploads", Key: key, ContentType: contentType }),
    { expiresIn: 300 },
  );
}
  

The browser then PUTs the file to that URL. Your server only ever handles the key, and the key is what you store in Postgres — never the file itself.

Serving files back link

A bucket is private by default, which is the correct default. Two ways out:

• Public bucket on a custom domain. Connect a domain you have on Cloudflare (Settings → Public access) and the CDN caches it worldwide. Right for avatars, product images, anything not secret.
• Presigned GetObject URLs. Same signing code with GetObjectCommand, a short expiry. Right for anything a customer paid for.

Skip r2.dev for production traffic — it’s rate limited and meant for testing.

Housekeeping link

• Name keys by their owner: uploads/{userId}/{uuid}-{filename}. Listing and deleting a user’s data later becomes trivial.
• Set a lifecycle rule to expire temporary prefixes automatically; 10 GB fills faster than you expect once thumbnails and old dumps pile up.
• Never ship the secret key to the browser. Presigned URLs exist precisely so you don’t have to.
• Keep backups here too — pg_dump output plus free egress means restoring costs nothing but time.

Next link

Before anyone can own a file, they have to sign in → Clerk