I Self-Host My Private Notes App on Cloudflare for $0/Month — Here's the Exact Setup

Description and use

The author built a free‑tier Cloudflare‑hosted notes app to replace paid SaaS services, keeping data ownership and costing $0/month.

Problem

The author wanted to avoid paying for Notion/Evernote and keep notes off third‑party servers.

Outcome

The app runs on Cloudflare’s free tier, costing ~$0/month, with features like quick notes, docs, Telegram capture, expiring share links, and one‑click backup.

Workflow

• Create D1 database, KV namespaces and R2 bucket in Cloudflare dashboard
• Deploy the Worker with wrangler and run schema migration
• Create admin login and harden security settings
• (Optional) Bind custom domain and connect Telegram bot for quick capture
• Export a backup to confirm everything is safe

Evidence

I got tired of paying Notion and Evernote every month — and tired of my notes living on someone else's servers.

Source

Everything lives in my own Cloudflare account, no VPS involved: Cloudflare Workers — serves the app and API; D1 — SQLite database for notes, docs, tags; KV — sessions and fast key-value lookups; R2 — file and image uploads.

Source

The whole thing takes about 30 minutes once you know the steps. The gotchas are in the details — R2 needs a credit card on file (Cloudflare's requirement, never charged on free tier), the API token needs exactly the right permissions, and the Telegram webhook has to be registered against the Worker's URL.

Source