Is Vercel Free? Yes, Until Your Project Makes $1

Yes, Vercel is free: the Hobby plan costs $0 a month and includes 100 GB of data transfer and 1 million CDN requests. But it's for personal, non-commercial use only. The day your project takes a payment, shows an ad or pays someone to build it, you need Vercel Pro at $20 a month per seat. Go over Hobby's limits and you can't pay for more; the feature pauses, in most cases for 30 days.

Prices checked 2026-10-01, all from Vercel's own docs and pricing page, linked next to each number. Vercel prices are in USD before tax.

I've been on the other side of "free". Railway started cheap for me and ended up at $500+ a month, mostly from one busy database. So my advice on free tiers is to know exactly where the edge is before you build on one. Here's where Vercel's is.

Would your project fit Vercel's free tier?

The calculator below checks your traffic against Hobby's limits and prices the same project on Vercel Pro and on a rented server. The number that usually decides it is requests per page view: every JavaScript chunk, font, image and API call counts as a CDN request, not only the page itself.

The functions part assumes one server-rendered request per page view with 30 ms of CPU, the same as in my Vercel pricing breakdown. Hobby has no row because it's $0 or nothing: if the "Fits Hobby's limits?" line says no, or your project makes money, Hobby isn't an option at any price.

Is Vercel free for commercial use?

No. Vercel's fair use guidelines say "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan." Commercial means the site is used for the financial gain of anyone involved in making it, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code. Asking for donations is allowed.

The commercial usage section lists what counts, word for word:

• "Any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors of the site"
• "Advertising the sale of a product or service"
• "Receiving payment to create, update, or host the site"
• "Affiliate linking is the primary purpose of the site"
• "The inclusion of advertisements, including but not limited to online advertising platforms like Google AdSense"

That definition is wider than most people assume. A landing page for your paid app is "advertising the sale of a product". A site you build for a client is commercial from the first commit, because you're being paid to create it, even if the client's site sells nothing. A blog with AdSense is commercial at zero revenue.

The pricing page puts it in one line: Hobby is for "personal, non-commercial use." What happens if you break the rule is in Vercel's paused deployments guide: commercial use on Hobby is a policy violation, and Vercel can pause the deployment and email you the details.

If you're unsure about your project, Vercel's answer is to contact support and ask.

What are the Vercel Hobby plan limits?

Hobby includes, per month: 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1 million CDN requests, 10 GB of Fast Origin Transfer, 4 hours of Active CPU, 360 GB-hours of memory, 1 million function invocations and 5,000 image transformations. There's no billing cycle and no time limit. Hobby stays free for as long as you stay non-commercial and under these numbers.

All from the Hobby plan docs:

Pro numbers are from the Pro plan docs and the iad1 rate card. One inconsistency: the pricing page lists 10M CDN requests for Pro, while the Pro plan docs and the Flat Rate CDN docs say the included tier is 1M. I used the docs' 1M.

The usage limits aren't the only ones. These come from the Hobby vs Pro table, the general limits and the cron docs:

The cron one is strict. A schedule like */30 * * * * doesn't run less often on Hobby; the deployment fails with "Hobby accounts are limited to daily cron jobs" (cron docs).

How many visitors can Vercel's free tier handle?

About 50,000 page views a month for a typical server-rendered app, and requests run out first, not bandwidth. At 20 requests per page view, 1 million CDN requests is 50,000 views. At 1 MB per view, 100 GB would last for 100,000. A lean static site at 5 requests per view can serve around 100,000 before bandwidth becomes the limit.

Here's how each Hobby limit compares for the app in my calculator: 1 MB per page, 20 requests per view, and one function call per view using 30 ms of CPU and 250 ms at the default 2 GB of memory. These are my assumptions, not measurements. Your Usage tab in the Vercel dashboard has your real numbers.

So for most apps the real Hobby ceiling is set by how many files a page loads. Cutting a page from 20 requests to 10 doubles the traffic you can serve for free. Compute is rarely the problem: Vercel's function allowance would carry this app to nearly half a million views.

What happens when you exceed Vercel's free tier?

Vercel doesn't charge you. It stops serving the thing you ran out of. The Hobby docs say "if you exceed your usage limits on the Hobby plan, you will have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use the feature again." For images, only new ones fail. For other limits, your production site can go down with a 503 error until you wait or upgrade.

Vercel's own wording, from the Hobby plan docs: "In most cases" the wait is 30 days. Some limits pause for less: Web Analytics collection "can resume after 7 days." What it looks like in practice, limit by limit:

Vercel emails you as you get near a limit (image docs). Images used to take the whole deployment down; since a 2023 change only new images fail.

The fast way out is upgrading. Per the trial docs, "When you upgrade to Pro, the pause status on your account will get lifted." Paused projects may still need resuming by hand from the project overview, according to the paused deployments guide.

I think this is the honest version of a free tier: no surprise bill. But it means a Hobby project that goes viral goes offline at the worst moment.

When exactly do you have to upgrade to Vercel Pro?

At the first of these that happens: your site takes a payment or links to something you sell, you add ads, someone pays you to build or host it, a second person needs deploy access, the repo moves to a GitHub organization, you need a cron job more than once a day, or your traffic passes Hobby's limits. Most projects hit a commercial trigger before a traffic one.

The checklist, with the reason each one forces Pro:

Two things soften the jump. Pro has a free trial: 14 days or until you pass the trial's usage limits, one per user account, with a $20 credit (trial docs). And a paid Pro team gets one free first-year domain on TLDs like .dev and .app (Pro plan docs). The trial doesn't include the domain.

How much does Vercel cost once you leave the free tier?

The floor is $20 a month for one deploying seat, which includes $20 of usage credit and the base CDN tier of 1M requests and 1 TB. Each extra person who deploys adds $20. Past 1M requests, the Flat Rate CDN tier adds $20, $100 or $300 a month. At 500,000 page views, my example app costs $40.

The CDN tiers, from the Flat Rate CDN docs:

Vercel moves you up a tier at the start of the next cycle if a whole month goes over; a one-day spike doesn't count. Without Flat Rate CDN, on-demand is $0.15 per GB and $2 per million requests in iad1 (iad1 pricing).

My example app (1 MB pages, 20 requests per view, one seat) at four sizes:

At 1 million views, the Flat Rate bill is $20 for the seat plus the $100 tier for 20M requests; functions cost about $6 and the credit covers them. On-demand, the same month is $150 of transfer plus $40 of requests plus $6 of functions, minus the $20 credit. For the full rate card, seat maths and add-ons, see my Vercel pricing breakdown.

Pro doesn't stop when the credit runs out. Vercel "switches your team to on-demand usage," and spend notifications start at $200 a month by default (Pro plan docs). If you want a hard cap, set one in Spend Management.

Is Vercel cheaper than running your own server?

Only while you're on Hobby. Once your project is commercial, a rented server costs about $16 a month for my example app at every size in the table, against $20 to $120 on Vercel Pro. You give up the global CDN and take on the server's upkeep, and you get no traffic ceiling to plan around.

Netcup is the one I'd look at first; it has a US datacenter in Manassas as well as Europe. Hetzner's prices are after its 15 June 2026 adjustment, for Germany and Finland. The $16 in my tables is a CX23 with its IPv4 address (about $7) plus $9 a month for custom domains on Ployz Cloud.

A million page views a month is about one page every two or three seconds, with the static files on top. A 2 vCPU server handles that comfortably, and 1 TB is a twentieth of the 20 TB Hetzner includes. There's no "pause" on a server either. If a post goes viral, the server gets slower; it doesn't go dark for 30 days.

What you take on, honestly:

• No global CDN. Your app is served from one city, so visitors on the other side of the world get slower first loads. You can put a CDN in front later.
• Upkeep is yours. OS updates, backups and the 3 a.m. outage are your job now.
• No autoscaling. One server has a ceiling. On Vercel Pro, a spike costs money instead.

I build Ployz, which runs this setup on a server you rent: push to GitHub and it builds and deploys with zero downtime once you set a health check, gives every pull request a preview environment with its own HTTPS address, and runs Postgres or Redis next to your app with one click. It's free on your own servers. If you'd rather wire it up by hand, Docker and Caddy get you most of the way for the same server price.

If you're weighing other platforms too, the fee types they all share are in PaaS pricing.

Is Vercel free forever?

Yes, for as long as your project stays personal, non-commercial and under the monthly limits. Hobby has no trial period and no expiry date; Vercel says "as the Hobby plan is a free tier there are no billing cycles." The only time limit in Vercel's free offering is the Pro trial, which ends after 14 days or when you pass its usage limits.

Two details from the trial docs: if the trial ends without a payment method, you go back to Hobby and aren't charged. And going back to Hobby removes every other team member, because Hobby is one person.

Vercel Hobby or your own server?

Pick Vercel Hobby if the project is personal and will never take money, show ads or be built for a client; it stays under about 50,000 page views a month; and you're the only person deploying it. For a portfolio, a side project or a demo, it's an excellent free deal and I'd use it.

Pick your own server if the project is going to make money, even a little, or someone else needs to deploy it, or you need a database and hourly jobs next to the app. The jump from Hobby is to $20 a seat on Vercel or about $16 total on a server, and only the server price stays flat as you grow. You take on updates and backups in exchange.

Ployz deploys your app to a server you rent, with preview environments and zero-downtime deploys, and it's free on your own servers.