Vercel Pricing, Worked Out: What a Real Next.js App Costs at 100 GB, 1 TB and 5 TB

A Next.js app on Vercel Pro costs about $40 a month at 100 GB of traffic, $120 at 1 TB and $332 at 5 TB, with one seat and the default Flat Rate CDN. The same app on a rented Hetzner server costs $16 to $20 a month at all three sizes. The plan price is the small part. At every size, what you pay is set by how many CDN requests your pages make.

Prices checked 2026-10-01, all from Vercel's and Hetzner's own pages, linked next to each number. Vercel bills in USD before tax. I used the cheapest Vercel region, Washington D.C. (iad1).

I've paid for convenience before. My first month on Laravel Cloud was about $600. Railway was $500+ a month and climbing, mostly from a busy database. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs more than I ever ran on Railway. So I'm biased toward renting a server, and I'll show the maths so you can check me.

What would your app cost on Vercel?

The calculator below uses the same rates as the tables. Requests per page view and CPU per page view are the two inputs worth finding in your Vercel Usage tab.

How much does Vercel cost per month?

Vercel has three plans. Hobby is $0 and for personal, non-commercial use only. Pro is $20 a month per deploying seat and includes $20 of usage credit. Enterprise is custom. On Pro, your real bill is $20 per seat, plus your Flat Rate CDN tier ($0, $20, $100 or $300), plus whatever usage is left after the $20 credit. For most apps the CDN tier is the biggest line.

The $20 credit doesn't roll over. It "expires at the end of the month if you don't use it" (Pro plan docs). Vercel turns on spend notifications at $200 a month by default, and a Pro team is not stopped when it runs out of credit. It moves to on-demand billing (Plans).

What does Vercel charge for bandwidth and requests?

New Pro teams get Flat Rate CDN by default since 8 September 2026. You pay a fixed tier for CDN requests and data transfer: the base tier is included with Pro (1M requests, 1 TB), then $20 (10M requests, 50 TB), $100 (50M, 50 TB) and $300 (150M, 50 TB). Without it, on-demand is $0.15 per GB and $2 per million requests in iad1.

Look at the shape of that table. Bandwidth almost stopped mattering: every paid tier gives you 50 TB. Requests decide your tier. And "static assets and functions all incur CDN Requests" (CDN pricing), so every JavaScript chunk, font, image and API call counts, not only page views.

Two more rules from the Flat Rate CDN docs: a one-day spike doesn't move you up, but if a whole month goes over your tier, Vercel moves you to the next tier at the start of the next cycle. Go past the $300 tier and you're back on on-demand pricing. Existing Pro teams have to switch Flat Rate CDN on themselves (announcement).

Note that older guides still call these "Edge Requests". Vercel renamed them CDN Requests.

One inconsistency to know about: the pricing page lists "10M / month" 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. If 10M turns out to be right, the 100 GB bill below drops to $20 and the 1 TB bill to $40.

The on-demand rates, if you turn Flat Rate CDN off or haven't switched:

Other regions cost more: data transfer goes up to $0.35 per GB and requests up to $3.20 per million (regional pricing).

What do Vercel Functions and Active CPU cost?

Vercel bills functions on three meters: Active CPU at $0.128 per hour, Provisioned Memory at $0.0106 per GB-hour, and $0.60 per million invocations, all in iad1. CPU is billed only while your code runs, but memory is billed the whole time a request is open, including while you wait on the database. For a typical server-rendered page this adds up to a few dollars a month.

The memory meter is the one people miss. Vercel's own example: "If your function takes 100ms to process data but spends 400ms waiting for a database query, you're only billed for the 100ms of active CPU time" (docs). Memory, though, "continues billing while handling requests, even during I/O operations." A page that waits two seconds on an AI model pays for two seconds of 2 GB.

What does Vercel image optimization cost?

On Pro, next/image costs $0.05 per 1,000 transformations, $0.40 per million cache reads and $4.00 per million cache writes in iad1. You pay for a transformation on every cache miss, not on every view, so the bill follows how many distinct image sizes you have, not your traffic. For most apps it's a dollar or two.

Hobby includes 5,000 transformations a month. Past that, "new images will fail to optimize and instead return a runtime error response with 402 status code" (image pricing). Images you already optimized keep working.

What does a real Next.js app cost on Vercel at 100 GB, 1 TB and 5 TB?

With one seat and Flat Rate CDN, my reference app costs $40 a month at 100 GB, $120 at 1 TB and $332 at 5 TB. On on-demand CDN pricing it's $21, $197 and $982. Flat Rate is the better deal from about 200 GB up. Under that, on-demand is cheaper, because 2M requests bumps you into the $20 tier.

Here's the app I priced. Change the numbers in the calculator below if yours is different.

• A Next.js app with server-rendered pages, in iad1, one deploying seat.
• 1 MB transferred per page view, so 1 GB is about 1,000 page views.
• 20 CDN requests per page view (HTML, JS chunks, CSS, fonts, images, one API call). That's 20,000 requests per GB.
• One function invocation per page view, 30 ms of Active CPU, 250 ms wall time at the default 2 GB, and a 50 KB response.
• 10,000 image transformations a month, about 130,000 cache write units (images around 100 KB, written in 8 KB units).

These per-page numbers are my assumptions, not measurements. Your project's Usage tab shows the real ones. I subtract the $20 credit only from metered usage, not from the Flat Rate CDN tier, which is a fixed subscription.

Worked bills, Vercel Pro with Flat Rate CDN (default for new teams):

Same app, Pro with on-demand CDN:

Two things stand out. First, compute is cheap for this app: under $32 a month even at 5 million page views. Vercel's function pricing is fair for pages that do a little work. Second, the CDN tier is 50 to 90% of the bill. If your pages load 60 requests instead of 20, the 1 TB app crosses 50M requests and lands in the $300 tier.

Every extra deploying seat adds $20 to all of these.

Is Vercel cheaper than running your own server?

No. The same app costs $16 a month on a Hetzner CX23 at 100 GB and 1 TB, and about $20 on a CX33 at 5 TB, including $9 for custom domains on Ployz Cloud. That's 2.5x cheaper than Vercel at 100 GB, 7.5x at 1 TB and 16x at 5 TB. You give up Vercel's global CDN and take on the server's upkeep.

Hetzner prices are from its 15 June 2026 price adjustment, before VAT, in Germany and Finland. A CX23 with its IPv4 address comes to about $7 a month; add $9 for custom domains on Ployz Cloud and you get the $16 below. The server prices in USD are Hetzner's own; the IPv4 figure in USD is my conversion.

Netcup is the other provider I'd look at, and often the better deal: its VPS 500 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD, traffic included) is €8.26 a month incl. VAT on a 12-month term, with datacenters in Europe and Manassas in the US (netcup VPS plans).

The 5 TB app is about 5 million page views a month, roughly two a second on average. At 30 ms of CPU each, a 4 vCPU server is mostly idle. 5 TB is a quarter of the 20 TB included traffic, so bandwidth is not a line on the bill.

What the server price doesn't include, so you can weigh it honestly:

• No global CDN. Your app is served from one city. Visitors far away get slower first loads.
• No autoscaling. If a launch brings 50x your normal traffic, one server has a ceiling. On Vercel, the bill goes up instead.
• Upkeep is yours. OS updates and backups are your job. If the server goes down at 3 a.m., that's your problem now.

I build Ployz, which runs this setup on a server you rent: push to GitHub, it builds on your server, deploys with zero downtime once you set a health check and gives every pull request a preview environment. It's free on your own servers, and custom domains are $9 a month. If you'd rather do it by hand, Docker plus Caddy gets you most of the way, and the server cost is the same.

Is Vercel truly free?

Only for personal, non-commercial projects. Vercel's pricing page says "Our Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use." Within that, Hobby includes 100 GB of transfer, 1M CDN requests and 4 hours of Active CPU a month. Go over and Vercel pauses the feature, usually until 30 days have passed. There's no paying a bit extra on Hobby.

The pause rule is on the Hobby plan page: "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." My reference app at 100 GB already makes 2M requests, so it doesn't fit on Hobby even before the commercial rule. Once a project earns money, the honest floor is $20 a month.

Which is cheaper, Vercel or AWS?

I think building it yourself on AWS usually comes out cheaper than Vercel for the same traffic, because Vercel charges for packaging the CDN, functions and deploys into one product. But AWS makes you assemble and run those pieces yourself. If you're going to manage infrastructure anyway, a rented server is cheaper than either for a small or medium app.

I haven't priced AWS line by line here, and I won't quote AWS numbers I haven't checked against AWS's own pages. What I can say from the tables above: at 1 TB, the Vercel bill is $120 and the rented server is $16. Whatever AWS costs for CloudFront, Lambda and a load balancer, it has to beat $16 to be worth the setup.

What are the limitations of Vercel?

The main ones are cost and shape. Requests, seats and memory are all metered, so the bill grows with your traffic and your team. Functions on Pro run up to 800 seconds (30 minutes in beta), so long jobs need somewhere else. Hobby is non-commercial. And a long-running worker doesn't fit in a function, so most full-stack apps end up paying for a second service.

From the Hobby vs Pro table:

Paid add-ons stack up for teams: SAML SSO is $300 a month, password-protecting a project is $20 a month per project, and static IPs are $100 a month per project (Pro add-ons).

What is cheaper than Vercel?

A rented server is the cheapest option for most apps: about $16 a month for the reference app at 1 TB, against $120 on Vercel. What you trade is the global CDN and someone else running the box. For an app with steady traffic and one database, I think that trade is worth it.

What I'd actually do, by situation:

• Side project, no money involved: Vercel Hobby is free and good. Stay there.
• Small commercial app under about 200 GB: Vercel Pro on on-demand CDN is about $21. Hard to beat for zero ops.
• 1 TB and up, or a team of three or more: a server. At 1 TB it's $120 against $16, and every seat on Vercel adds $20.
• You also need Postgres, Redis or a long-running worker: a server. One box runs all of them for the same $16 to $20.

Vercel or your own server?

Pick Vercel if your app is mostly static or cached, your visitors are spread across the world, you're one person under a few hundred GB a month, or you never want to think about a server. The $20 Pro plan with on-demand CDN is a fair price at that size.

Pick your own server if you're past 1 TB, your pages load many assets, you're paying for more than one seat, or you also run a database and workers. The bill stops tracking your traffic, and a $16 server covers what costs $120 to $332 on Vercel. You take on OS 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.