Building Intelligence Dashboards on Cloudflare Workers

When our sales team needed competitive intelligence that was always current, I had two options: buy a SaaS tool at $500/month or build one on Cloudflare Workers for essentially free.

The Architecture

The system is straightforward. A scheduled Worker runs every 6 hours, pulls data from multiple sources, enriches it, and stores the result in KV. A second Worker serves a templated HTML dashboard that reads from KV and renders the latest intel.

Why Workers Over a Traditional Backend

No servers to manage. No cold starts to worry about. The dashboard loads from the edge, globally, in under 100ms. Total monthly cost: $0 on the free tier.

Lessons Learned

The constraint of Workers (CPU time limits, no persistent connections) forced better architecture decisions. Caching became intentional, not an afterthought. Data enrichment moved to scheduled jobs instead of on-demand, which actually improved data quality.

The Broader Point

The best internal tools are the ones that cost nothing to run and everything to not have. When your sales team can pull up competitive context in 2 seconds instead of 20 minutes of Googling, the compound effect on deal velocity is real.