TL;DR: Netlify costs $0 on Free (300 credits a month), $9 a month on Personal (1,000 credits) and $20 to $126 a month on Pro (3,000 to 20,000 credits). In practice a small static site pays $9, a Next.js app with 100,000 page views about $30, and a content site with a million page views about $246, mostly for bandwidth at $0.13 per GB.
- Pick Netlify Free if your site is a portfolio with a few thousand visits and few deploys. When its 300 credits run out, every site on the account pauses.
- Pick Netlify Personal ($9) if your site is static, under about 50 GB a month, and you want deploy previews and forms without running anything.
- Pick Netlify Pro if you need a team, more than one concurrent build, or more than about 2,000 credits a month.
- Pick your own server if you're past 100 GB a month, deploy many times a day, or need a backend that runs longer than 60 seconds.
- Pick Ployz, which I build, if you want push-to-deploy and preview environments on that server.
How much does Netlify cost per month?
| Plan | Price a month | Credits a month | Extra credits | Team and builds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 300, hard limit | None | 1 concurrent build |
| Personal | $9 | 1,000 | 500 for $5 | 1 owner, 1 concurrent build |
| Pro | $20 to $126 | 3,000 to 20,000 | 1,500 for $10 | Unlimited members, 3 concurrent builds |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | SSO, 99.99% SLA |
Sources: Netlify pricing, Plans.
Every meter draws from the same credits. On Pro a credit is worth about $0.0067, so 1 GB of bandwidth costs $0.13, a production deploy $0.10 and a million requests $1.33.
What would your site cost on Netlify?
Pick the site closest to yours. The calculator turns its traffic into Netlify credits, then into dollars on the cheapest Personal or Pro setup. Open "Customize" to set your own numbers. Requests per page view count every HTML file, script, stylesheet, font and image, and your browser's network tab shows the real number for your site. Each function call is assumed to run 250 ms at Netlify's default 1 GB, because compute is rarely more than a few dollars.
- Bandwidth
- 100 GB
- Web requests
- 2.0M
- Netlify credits
- 3,369
- Free plan (300 credits)
- paused around day 2
- Netlify Personal$34/mo
$9 for 1,000 credits, then 500-credit packs at $5. One owner, one concurrent build.
- Netlify Pro$30/mo
Cheapest Pro tier ($20 to $126) plus 1,500-credit packs at $10. Unlimited members. Functions assumed 250 ms at 1 GB.
- Your own server + Ployz$7/mo
Hetzner CX23 ($6.49 + $0.60 IPv4), or CX33 ($9.99) past 5 TB. Ployz is free. $0 extra if the server already runs your other apps.
What is a Netlify credit worth in dollars?
A credit is a prepaid unit that every Netlify meter draws from: bandwidth, requests, production deploys and function time. On Pro, a credit costs $20 / 3,000 = $0.0067, and extra packs cost the same ($10 / 1,500). On Personal, a credit is $0.009 in the plan and $0.01 in a pack.
Netlify publishes the credit cost of each meter (How credits work). The dollar columns are my arithmetic.
| Meter | Credits | Pro ($0.0067/credit) | Personal pack ($0.01/credit) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 20 per GB | $0.13 per GB | $0.20 per GB |
| Web requests | 2 per 10,000 | $1.33 per 1M | $2.00 per 1M |
| Production deploy | 15 each | $0.10 | $0.15 |
| Compute | 10 per GB-hour | $0.07 per GB-hour | $0.10 per GB-hour |
| AI inference | 180 per $1 of model usage | about $1.20 per $1 | $1.80 per $1 |
| Form submissions | Free | $0 | $0 |
Netlify's own launch post gives the same pack rates: "$0.13/GB" for bandwidth and "$0.07/GB-Hour" for compute (Netlify blog).
| Meter | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Web requests | Every file a visitor loads: "HTML pages, images, JavaScript, CSS files, and other static assets," plus function calls, redirects and edge functions. A page with 20 assets is 20 requests. |
| Bandwidth | Everything sent out: pages, images, downloads and function responses. |
| Production deploys | Successful deploys to your main site. Deploy previews, branch deploys, failed deploys and rollbacks are free. |
| Compute | Function run time times memory. Functions get 1 GB by default, so one second is 1/3,600 of a GB-hour (Functions billing). Edge functions are billed as web requests, not compute. |
Deploys surprise most people. Twenty production deploys a month use 300 credits. That's the entire Free plan before a single visitor arrives.
Pro credit tiers and rollover
Bigger Pro tiers are a little cheaper per credit: $126 for 20,000 is $0.0063. The calculator picks the cheapest tier plus packs for you.
| Pro tier | Price a month | Unused credits |
|---|---|---|
| 3,000 credits | $20 | Expire at month end |
| 5,000 credits | $33 | Carry forward one extra month |
| 10,000 credits | $63 | Carry forward one extra month |
| 15,000 credits | $95 | Carry forward one extra month |
| 20,000 credits | $126 | Carry forward one extra month |
Credits on Free and Personal expire at month end, and credit packs never expire (How credits work). Pro also adds password protection, shared environment variables and 30 days of monitoring. Extra concurrent builds are $40 a month each on Personal and Pro, and Free can't buy them (Plans).
What happens when Netlify credits run out?
Netlify pauses every site on your account. Visitors see a "Site not available" page, and you can't deploy. That lasts until your next billing cycle starts, you upgrade, or you buy credits. There are no overage charges on credit plans.
From Netlify's billing FAQ: once your credits are used up, "all of your web projects (sites/apps) are paused." They stop receiving traffic and form submissions, and each stays "in a paused state until the start of the next billing cycle." Netlify emails you at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of your credits.
Note the word all. Credits are shared across the team. So one project that goes viral takes every other project on the account down with it.
Auto recharge is off by default. The Free plan can't turn it on, so a Free site that runs out stays down until the month resets. On Personal and Pro, auto recharge buys a pack (500 for $5, or 1,500 for $10) each time your balance hits zero (How credits work). That trades the outage for a bill. I'd turn it on for anything that earns money, and set a budget alert you'll actually read.
The pause is also the upside. Under Netlify's old plans, Pro and Starter billed bandwidth overage at $55 per 100 GB (legacy plans). That's how a static site ended up with the $104K bill thread on Reddit that still ranks for "netlify pricing". On a credit plan without auto recharge, the worst case is downtime, not a five-figure invoice.
What do three real sites cost on Netlify?
A static marketing site costs $9 a month on Personal. A Next.js app with functions costs $30 on Pro. A busy content site costs about $246 on Pro. In all three, bandwidth is the biggest line, and function compute barely registers.
These are my assumptions, not measurements, and they're the three presets in the calculator above.
Site 1: static marketing site. 10,000 page views a month, 1 MB per page, 15 requests per page, 20 production deploys, no functions.
| Line | Usage | Credits | Dollars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 10 GB | 200 | |
| Web requests | 150,000 | 30 | |
| Production deploys | 20 | 300 | |
| Total | 530 | $9 on Personal |
530 credits is over the Free plan's 300. So on Free this site pauses around day 16. Deploys are 57% of the credits. Batch your content changes, or deploy from a branch that only merges weekly, and it might fit on Free.
Site 2: Next.js app with functions. 100,000 page views, 1 MB per page, 20 requests per page, 60 production deploys (about three a working day), and one 250 ms function call per page view at the default 1 GB.
| Line | Usage | Credits | Dollars at Pro rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 100 GB | 2,000 | $13.33 |
| Web requests | 2M | 400 | $2.67 |
| Production deploys | 60 | 900 | $6.00 |
| Compute | 6.9 GB-hours | 69 | $0.46 |
| Total | 3,369 | $30: Pro $20 + one $10 pack |
On Personal the same usage costs $34 ($9 plus five packs). The 5,000-credit Pro tier would be $33. So Pro at $20 with auto recharge is the cheapest way to pay for it.
Site 3: busy content site. 1 million page views, 1.5 MB per page, 30 requests per page, 120 production deploys (several editors publishing daily), and 50,000 small function calls (search, newsletter signup) at 250 ms.
| Line | Usage | Credits | Dollars at Pro rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 1.5 TB | 30,000 | $200 |
| Web requests | 30M | 6,000 | $40 |
| Production deploys | 120 | 1,800 | $12 |
| Compute | 3.5 GB-hours | 35 | $0.23 |
| Total | 37,835 | $246: Pro 20,000 tier ($126) + 12 packs ($120) |
At this size Netlify's bill tracks bandwidth almost one to one. Halve the page weight with smaller images and you save about $100 a month.
Did Netlify's pricing go up in 2026?
For bandwidth-heavy sites, yes. On 14 April 2026 Netlify changed its credit rates (April 2026 changelog). Teams paid less, and sites that mostly serve big files paid more.
| Change on 14 April 2026 | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 10 credits per GB | 20 credits per GB |
| Compute | 5 credits per GB-hour | 10 credits per GB-hour |
| Web requests | 3 credits per 10,000 | 2 credits per 10,000 |
| Form submissions | Charged | Free |
| Pro seats | $20 per seat | $20 a month "with unlimited seats" |
Netlify says that "for 98% of our customers, the monthly bill stays the same or goes down" (Netlify blog).
The credit model itself started on 4 September 2025. Accounts created before then can stay on their legacy Free, Starter or Pro plans. Switching to credits "is irreversible" (Plans). Legacy Pro includes 1 TB at $19 per member. Run your last few months through the calculator before you switch: 1 TB alone is 20,000 credits, which is the $126 tier.
What are the downsides of using Netlify?
Pausing is the big one: run out of credits and every site on the account goes offline. After that come the meters and the limits. None of it is unusual for a platform, but it adds up.
| Downside | Detail |
|---|---|
| Bandwidth | Metered at $0.13 per GB on Pro |
| Deploys | Each production deploy costs credits |
| Function limits | Synchronous functions time out at 60 seconds, background functions at 15 minutes, 1 GB of memory by default (Functions configuration) |
| No long-running processes | No place for a queue worker or a WebSocket server |
| Shared credits | One busy project spends credits for all of them |
| Builds | Free and Personal get one concurrent build; extra builds are $40 a month each |
Netlify sells a database, but a Node or Python backend usually ends up on a second platform, with a second bill. I wrote about that split-stack pattern in Railway vs Vercel.
What are the best Netlify alternatives?
Pick by what your site is, not by the free tier. For a static site, look at Cloudflare, GitHub Pages or a server you already pay for. For a full-stack app, Vercel is the closest swap, and Render, Railway or your own server cover the backend Netlify doesn't run.
| Option | Good for | The catch | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers static assets | Static sites at any traffic | Requests to static assets are free and unlimited; Pages free plan allows 500 builds a month | Workers billing, Pages limits |
| GitHub Pages | Docs, portfolios, open source | 1 GB site, soft 100 GB/month bandwidth, no commercial business or SaaS | GitHub Pages limits |
| Vercel | Next.js with server rendering | $20 per developer seat on Pro; see my Vercel pricing breakdown | |
| Your own server | A static site next to your other apps | You run the box | Hetzner, Netcup |
I compared the full-stack options in more depth in Vercel alternatives, and most of that list applies to Netlify too. For the fee types every platform uses, such as seats, bandwidth and per-service charges, see the hidden costs of PaaS.
Static sites cost almost nothing to serve. A static site is a folder of files, and any web server can host it next to your API, your Postgres and your worker. If you already pay for a server, adding a marketing site to it costs $0 more. Caddy serves a folder with HTTPS in a few lines of config.
Is Netlify cheaper than running your own server?
For a small static site, the two are close: $9 on Netlify Personal against about $7 for a server with Ployz. From about 100 GB a month up, a server wins clearly: $7 against $30 for the Next.js app and $246 for the busy content site. A Hetzner CX23 includes 20 TB of traffic, so bandwidth stops being a line on the bill.
I'm biased toward renting a server. My first month on Laravel Cloud was about $600, and Railway was $500+ a month and climbing. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs everything. For a static site, though, Netlify is often fairly priced, which is why I'd still pick it for a small one.
| Server | Specs | Monthly price | Traffic | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Netcup VPS 500 | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD | €8.26 incl. VAT (12-month term) | Included | Netcup VPS |
| Hetzner CX23 | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe | $6.49 + about $0.60 IPv4 | 20 TB | Hetzner price list, Cost-Optimized plans |
| Hetzner CX33 | 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe | $9.99 + about $0.60 IPv4 | 20 TB | Same |
Hetzner's CX servers are in Germany and Finland only. Netcup is the one I'd look at first. It has datacenters in Europe and in Manassas in the US.
| Site | Netlify | Own server with Ployz |
|---|---|---|
| Static marketing site, 10 GB | $9 (Personal) | $7 (CX23), or $0 more on a server you already have |
| Next.js app, 100 GB | $30 (Pro) | $7 (CX23) |
| Busy content site, 1.5 TB | $246 (Pro) | $7 (CX23) |
The server prices are for Europe. Ployz adds nothing to them, because it's free on your own servers, custom domains included. Without it, you set up Caddy and deploys yourself.
What you give up:
| You give up | What it means |
|---|---|
| A global CDN | Your files come from one city. You can put a free CDN in front of a server, but that's another piece to set up. |
| The pause safety net | The server costs the same in a quiet month and a viral one, up to what the box can handle. No surprise bills either. |
Where Ployz fits
Ployz deploys apps from GitHub to servers you rent. It's free on your own servers, custom domains included.
| Ployz does | Ployz doesn't do yet | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Push to GitHub and Ployz builds and deploys, no Dockerfile needed for common languages | GitLab | Deploy from GitHub, or run ployz up from your machine |
| A preview environment per pull request at its own https address | A global CDN | Put a CDN in front of the server |
Deploys have zero downtime when a health check is set. Ployz also runs long-running services, workers and one-click Postgres next to your site, and it can keep a mirror of the database on a second server, synced when you ask.
If your site is a small static site under about 50 GB a month, Netlify Personal costs only about $2 more than a server with Ployz. It also leaves you nothing to look after, so I'd pick it unless you already have a server.
FAQ
Is Netlify 100% free?
The Free plan costs nothing, but its 300 credits are small. They cover about 15 GB of bandwidth, or 1.5 million requests, or 20 production deploys a month, and every site you have shares them. A portfolio with a few thousand visits fits. A real marketing site with weekly deploys usually doesn't, and when the credits run out the site is paused, not billed.
At 1 MB a page and 15 requests per page, 300 credits covers roughly 13,000 page views with no deploys at all. Deploy twice a week and that drops to about 7,400. Compare Vercel's Hobby plan, which gives 100 GB but bans commercial use. Netlify's Free plan has no such rule in the plan table, but the credit cap is much tighter.
Does Netlify charge overage fees?
No, credit plans have no overage fees. When credits run out, your sites pause unless auto recharge buys another pack. Legacy plans did bill overage, at $55 per 100 GB of bandwidth.
Do deploy previews cost credits on Netlify?
No, deploy previews are free. Only successful production deploys cost credits, at 15 credits each. Branch deploys, failed deploys and rollbacks are free too.
Is Netlify Pro worth it over Personal?
Pro is worth it once you use more than about 2,000 credits a month or need a team. At 3,369 credits, Personal costs $34 and Pro costs $30. Pro also adds unlimited members and 3 concurrent builds.
Is Netlify or GitHub Pages better?
GitHub Pages is better for a free docs site, portfolio or open-source project, because it costs $0 and allows about 100 GB a month. Netlify is better for a business site, because GitHub Pages doesn't allow commercial sites or SaaS, and it has no deploy previews, forms or functions. GitHub Pages also caps a site at 1 GB (GitHub Pages limits).
How I checked
I checked prices on 2026-10-08, all from Netlify's own pricing page and docs, linked next to each number. Netlify bills in USD. The dollar value of each meter is my arithmetic from Netlify's credit rates. The three sites are my assumptions, run through the calculator on this page. Server prices are from Hetzner's 15 June 2026 price list and Netcup's VPS page. I build Ployz, which is mentioned in this article as one option.