Most developers know about OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, and Cerebras. What many developers don't realize is that Cloudflare Workers AI provides access to a large collection of open-source models through a single API endpoint. The interesting part? Many of these models are usable on Cloudflare's free tier. I recently decided to test Cloudflare Workers AI to answer three questions:
Which models are actually available on the free plan? Which models are best for coding? How do Cloudflare's limits compare to Groq, Cerebras, and other providers?
The Experiment Cloudflare exposes a model catalog API: Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$AccountId/ai/models/search" -Headers $Headers
My account returned more than 300 models. Initially, I assumed that every model listed would be available. I was wrong. Some models appeared in the catalog but were blocked when inference requests were executed. For example: zai-org/glm-5.3 zai-org/glm-5.3-flash zai-org/glm-5.2 moonshotai/kimi-k2.6 moonshotai/kimi-k2.7-code
returned: { "code": 5035, "message": "Model is not available on the Workers Free plan" }
Enumerated all available models Executed a test inference Recorded successful responses Recorded paid-plan restrictions
Models That Worked on the Free Tier After testing, these models successfully accepted inference requests. OpenAI openai/gpt-oss-20b openai/gpt-oss-120b
Qwen qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct qwen/qwen3-30b-a3b-fp8 qwen/qwen3.8-27b qwen/qwq-32b
Meta Llama meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct-fp8 meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct meta/llama-3.2-3b-instruct meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast meta/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct
Google Gemma google/gemma-2b-it-lora google/gemma-7b-it-lora google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it aisingapore/gemma-sea-lion-v4-27b-it
Mistral mistral/mistral-7b-instruct-v0.2-lora mistralai/mistral-small-3.1-24b-instruct
Biggest Surprise I initially started testing because I wanted access to GLM 5.3 Flash. The result? GLM 4.7 Flash ✅ GLM 5.2 ❌ GLM 5.3 ❌ GLM 5.3 Flash ❌
GLM 4.7 Flash was available on the free tier while all newer GLM models required a paid plan.
Best Models For Coding After testing many providers over the last year, this is how I would rank the Cloudflare free models for software development. 🥇 GPT-OSS-120B @cf/openai/gpt-oss-120b
Terraform Kubernetes DevOps AWS Architecture Refactoring Multi-file repositories
Generating code Reviewing pull requests Fixing bugs Understanding repositories Continue.dev Cline
This is the model I would use when a pipeline breaks at 2 AM and nobody knows why.
Understanding Cloudflare Limits One thing I wanted to understand was whether Cloudflare behaves like Groq. The answer is no. Groq commonly applies limits per model. For example: Model A → X RPM Model B → Y RPM