Cloudflare Basin is now generally available. It is a serverless analytics platform built on Apache Iceberg and R2 object storage that lets you ingest events, catalog them as open-format tables, and run SQL queries against the result — with no warehouse to provision and no egress fees when you pull data out. If you have been duct-taping together S3, Athena, and Glue just to do event analytics, Basin is a direct answer to that.
Three Products, One Platform
Basin unifies three services that Cloudflare shipped separately over the past year:
- Basin Pipelines (formerly Cloudflare Pipelines) ingests events from Workers bindings, HTTP endpoints, or Logpush. You define a schema, apply SQL transformations, and data lands as Apache Iceberg tables or R2 files. Throughput cap is 3 GB/s per stream.
- Basin Catalog (formerly R2 Data Catalog) is a fully managed Iceberg REST catalog. It runs automatic compaction, snapshot expiration, and metadata cleanup so your tables stay performant without a separate maintenance job.
- Basin SQL (formerly R2 SQL) is a serverless distributed query engine — 190+ scalar and aggregate functions, joins, window functions, CTEs. No provisioning. Available via Wrangler, the API, or the dashboard.
To start, you create a catalog in one command:
npx wrangler basin catalog create my-catalogThe official getting started guide walks through ingesting your first events and running a query in a few minutes.
Apache Iceberg Means You Own Your Data
The most important design choice Basin made is building on Apache Iceberg rather than a proprietary format. That matters because every table you write through Basin is readable by DuckDB, Snowflake, Apache Spark, and PyIceberg without touching Cloudflare’s query engine. Your data does not become Cloudflare-only data.
This is worth emphasizing in 2026 because Iceberg has effectively won the open table format competition. Delta Lake’s Universal Format now writes Iceberg-compatible metadata. Hudi added native Iceberg support. Building on Iceberg today means maximum interoperability tomorrow.
The Pricing Case
Basin SQL charges $2.50 per TB scanned — roughly half of AWS Athena’s $5 per TB. Ingestion into Pipelines is free. R2 storage runs $0.015 per GB per month. Egress is zero.
| Platform | Query Price | Egress |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Basin | $2.50/TB | $0 |
| AWS Athena | $5/TB | ~$0.09/GB |
| BigQuery (on-demand) | $4.69/TiB | ~$0.12/GB |
The egress number is where the real lock-in lives. AWS and GCP charge data transfer rates to move data out of their storage, which is precisely how they enforce data gravity. Basin’s zero-egress policy on R2 is not just a pricing choice — it removes the switching cost that keeps teams on more expensive stacks.
Who Basin Is Actually For
Ramin Muradov, a data analyst at PashaPay, described the target well: “Teams whose data is too small to justify dedicated infrastructure and too big to fit in Excel. They now have an option.”
Dax Raad, co-founder of Anomaly, already made the switch: “We moved our entire company’s data pipeline to Basin Pipelines, Catalog, and SQL, replacing a complex AWS S3 and Athena setup with a cleaner, serverless architecture.”
The practical fit is developer teams running event analytics, infrastructure telemetry, billing metrics, or e-commerce funnel tracking — workloads where you want SQL access to streaming data without the operational weight of a full data warehouse. Basin is not a Snowflake replacement for teams doing complex multi-join analytical workloads. It is a sharp tool for teams that want analytics as a side effect of their application, not a separate infrastructure project.
Caveats Worth Noting
Basin is brand-new at GA. The portability story has not been stress-tested in production at scale — Cloudflare’s own documentation is careful to note the roadmap includes real-time processing, latest Iceberg spec support, and data sovereignty controls, none of which have committed timelines. If you are evaluating Basin for mission-critical analytics, factor in its maturity.
Get Started
Basin is live now on the Cloudflare dashboard. The getting started guide covers catalog creation, pipeline setup, and your first query. Full pricing details are on the Basin Pipelines pricing page. The full announcement is on the Cloudflare blog.
