Cloudflare Drop, run 1: a folder to a live domain
Cloudflare Drop took this site from a zip to a live domain in one evening, on the free plan, for $10.46 of domain. No account was asked for before the upload. A claimed site is not updated by dragging again: you deploy it with Wrangler from a terminal, which is the part the no-terminal promise does not cover.
Protocol (pre-registered 2026-09-06)
- Build this site (
npm run verify) and take thedist/folder as-is. - Open cloudflare.com/drop in a fresh browser session; note whether an account is required before upload.
- Drag the folder; capture the preview URL and its stated lifetime.
- Claim the deployment into the existing account.
- From the post-claim screen, buy
ranthrice.com; record the price shown before payment. - Attach the domain; time until the site answers on HTTPS.
- Change one line, rebuild, and find the update path.
- Record every reading in the ledger the same day.
The protocol was written before the run and is reproduced unchanged. What follows is what happened.
What the run answered
Does Drop need an account? No. Nothing was asked before the upload. The account came at the claim step, after the site was already live on a preview URL.
What happens after the preview? The preview is stated to last one hour. Claiming it inside that window turns a temporary account into a permanent one. This site was claimed into an existing account.
How long from upload to a domain? The claimed Worker was created at 23:24:21 UTC on 2026-09-06 (00:24 on 2026-09-07 in our time zone, which is why the run carries that date) and the zone for ranthrice.com existed at 23:29:50 UTC: five minutes and 29 seconds. The domain payment was confirmed nine seconds later, at 23:29:59 UTC.
What does the domain cost? $10.46 for the year, on the invoice in the account, dated 2026-09-06 in UTC. The same figure appears on our two other domains, bought on 2026-06-02 and 2026-06-26. The public pricing page had answered 403 two days before the run, so this is the first number we can stand behind.
Can a claimed site be updated, and how? Not by dragging again. The claim leaves you with a Worker holding your files. Updating it means installing Node, authenticating with wrangler login, and running wrangler deploy with the domain declared as a route. That deploy takes the domain over from the Drop worker, which then sits unused until you delete it.
The zero
The first upload produced a site that looked fine and was broken. The homepage worked. Every page inside a folder returned the homepage instead, with a 200 status: the systems pages, the doctrine, this ledger, the fonts, the images. The headers file was ignored, so the site shipped with no content security policy and no HSTS.
The cause was the archive, not Cloudflare. The zip was built with the PowerShell command that ships with Windows, which stores paths with backslashes. Read back, og\terms.png is not a file called terms.png inside a folder called og: it is a file whose whole name contains a backslash. The folder structure was gone before the upload started.
Two things follow. Upload the folder rather than a zip, or build the zip with a tool that writes forward slashes. And check a page two levels deep before believing a deployment, because the homepage tells you nothing.
What it cost
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Domain, one year | $10.46 |
| Hosting | $0 on the free plan |
| Anything else, to be live on our own domain | $0 |
There is no second line to the hosting bill. The free plan carries the static site and the small worker behind the forms; the domain is the whole recurring cost, and it is the one figure that comes with an invoice.
Limits
One run, one operator, one browser, one country. The site was 90 files and 2.6 MB, well inside any limit we could hit. We did not test the expiry of an unclaimed preview, a claim into a brand-new account, or a domain already registered elsewhere. A second and third run on other sites are required before the kit describes this path as tested.
Proof package. No screenshot was taken during this run, a lesson for run 2. The timed readings above come from the account’s API (Worker and zone creation times, invoice), kept in a dated audit folder and shared on request. There is therefore no downloadable package attached to this run, and this page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
This run is the annex of The Domain-Only Website Kit; the domain price and the two zeros of this run sit in the ledger as the rows of 2026-09-07.