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Mention explicitly that Durable Objects do *not* incur charges when idle and hibernateable #25869

@luluxxxlulu

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@luluxxxlulu

Existing documentation URL(s)

https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/platform/pricing/

What changes are you suggesting?

Duration is billed in wall-clock time as long as the Object is active, but is shared across all requests active on an Object at once.

A Durable Object incurs duration charges as long as the JavaScript object has to be in memory, either because it is actively handling a request, or because it cannot hibernate.

Those paragraphs strongly suggest that DOs will incur charges during the 10s period where they are idle and hibernateable. I think they should be reworded to make it very clear that DOs do not incur charges if they are still in memory but hibernateable.

Additional information

After researching for a week, my understanding has been that DOs incur charges while in memory. I was about to sign up for an alternative service. That is, until today, when I accidentally stumbled upon old Discord messages stating the contrary. It seems to be a recurring misunderstanding newcomers have. I grant you that I didn't read the fine print or take every word literally, and there is a snippet in Durable Object Lifecycle page clarifying this (if you scroll to the very end, that is), but docs should not be ambiguous. Cloudflare should not lose potential customers due to this.

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October 2025content:editRequest for content editsdocumentationDocumentation editsproduct:durable-objectsDurable Objects: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/using-durable-objects/stale

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