Is Vercel Free? Yes on Hobby, No for Commercial

Yes, Vercel is free on the Hobby plan: $0 per month, no expiry, no credit card required. Global CDN hosting, automatic CI/CD from Git, serverless compute, custom domains, free SSL, DDoS mitigation, and a Web Application Firewall are all included. The catch is in Vercel’s own pricing page FAQ: “Our Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use.” Commercial use requires Pro at $20 per developer seat per month (which includes $20 of usage credit). The Hobby free plan cannot be billed. If you exceed the limits, features pause until the 30-day window resets. Your project does not get deleted. Your credit card does not get charged. The opponent this post argues against is every “is Vercel no longer free” post that confuses granular metering with a price hike. Hobby is still $0.

What “free” actually means on Vercel

Three plans: Hobby at $0, Pro at $20/seat/month (with $20 usage credit built in), Enterprise at custom pricing. When people ask “is Vercel free,” they are asking one of three things:

Can I host my project without paying? Yes.
Will I stay free or get billed later? You stay free. Hobby cannot be charged.
Am I allowed to use it for what I want to use it for? Depends entirely on whether money is involved.

Vercel has not killed the free tier. The 2024-2026 change was in the shape of it. The old model counted bandwidth and function duration in simple buckets. The new model meters more resource types individually (edge requests, active CPU, provisioned memory, ISR reads/writes, image cache reads/writes). More granular is not more expensive. On Hobby, all meters add up to $0, because Hobby cannot be charged.

The full Hobby limits (July 2026)

From Vercel’s Limits and Hobby plan documentation.

Network and delivery

Resource	Hobby (free)	Pro ($20/mo)
Fast Data Transfer	100 GB / month	1 TB / month, then from $0.15/GB
Edge Requests	1M / month	10M / month, then from $2 per 1M
Fast Origin Transfer	10 GB / month	Usage-based
ISR Reads / Writes	1M / 200K	Usage-based
Image Transformations	5,000 / month	Usage-based
Image Cache Reads / Writes	300K / 100K	Usage-based
HTTPS certificates	Included, automatic	Included, automatic

Compute

Resource	Hobby (free)	Pro ($20/mo)
Function Invocations	1M / month	Usage-based, from $0.60 per 1M
Active CPU	4 CPU-hours / month	From $0.128 / hr
Provisioned Memory	360 GB-hours / month	From $0.0106 / GB-hr
Max function duration	300s (5 min)	300s default, up to 800s
CPU config	Standard only	Standard or Performance
Cold start prevention	Not available	Included
Multi-region functions	Not available	Up to 3 regions
Vercel Sandbox Active CPU	5 hours / month	Usage-based
Concurrent Sandboxes	10	2,000
Cron jobs	100 per project, once per day	100 per project, once per minute

Storage, builds, observability

Resource	Hobby (free)	Pro ($20/mo)
Blob storage	1 GB	1 GB, then $0.023/GB
Blob data transfer	10 GB / month	10 GB, then from $0.05/GB
Projects	200	Unlimited
Deployments per day	100	6,000
Concurrent builds	1	Up to 500
Build machine	2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM	4 vCPU, up to 30 vCPU
Max build time	45 min	45 min
Web Analytics	50K events / month, 1-month window	Metered, 12-month window
Speed Insights	10K events, 1 project	$10 per project / month
Runtime log retention	1 hour	1 day
WAF custom rules / IP blocks	3 / 3	40 / 100
Team seats	1	$20 per developer seat

Two entries in that table quietly hurt.

One concurrent build. Push three commits in a row and the second and third queue up behind the first. On a heavy monorepo, that is a real drag on your day, and it is one of the honest reasons developers upgrade even when they are nowhere near the traffic limits.

One hour of runtime logs. If a function throws an error at 2am and you look at 8am, the log is gone. For a personal project, fine. For anything you are on the hook to fix, that one-hour window is the first thing you will miss.

Is Vercel free forever, or does it expire

Hobby is free forever. No expiry, no trial countdown, no automatic upgrade. Usage allowances reset every 30 days and unused amounts do not roll over.

Do not confuse Hobby with the 14-day Pro trial (which has $20 in credits and does have a clock on it). Sign up for Hobby, deploy a portfolio, never touch it again for four years, and it stays live and free the entire time, as long as you stay inside the monthly allowances and fair use rules.

What happens when you exceed a limit:

You are not billed. Hobby accounts cannot purchase additional usage. Vercel says this directly in its pricing FAQ.
The resource pauses instead. In most cases you wait until the 30-day window rolls over before the feature works again.
Some resources have shorter pauses. Web Analytics gives you a 3-day grace period after 50K events, then stops collecting, and resumes 7 days later.
Your project does not get deleted. You get notifications as you approach limits.

Compare with Render, whose free Postgres tier expires 30 days after creation and gets deleted after a 14-day grace period unless you upgrade. Vercel does not have that kind of demolition timer.

The honest tradeoff: “pauses instead of bills” is great for your wallet and terrible for uptime. If your side project has a real audience and you go over 100 GB of transfer on day 22 of the month, your site is effectively down for eight days. Free plans protect your credit card, not your availability.

Is Vercel free for commercial use

No. Hobby is restricted to non-commercial personal use only. Commercial use requires Pro or Enterprise.

Vercel defines commercial usage as any deployment used for the financial gain of anyone involved in producing it, including a paid employee or consultant who wrote the code. Asking for donations is explicitly allowed.

From the Vercel Fair Use Guidelines, these count as commercial:

Any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors
Advertising the sale of a product or service
Receiving payment to create, update, or host the site
Affiliate linking being the primary purpose of the site
Including advertisements (including Google AdSense)

Not commercial:

Asking for donations

Read the list against real projects and the edges get sharp:

Your project	Hobby allowed?	Why
Personal portfolio, no ads, no rate card	Yes	Personal, non-commercial
Portfolio with a “hire me, $50/hr” rate card	Grey area, lean to Pro	Advertising a service
Blog with AdSense	No	Advertisements
Blog with Buy Me a Coffee link	Yes	Donations excluded
Affiliate review site	No	Affiliate linking as primary purpose
SaaS landing page with a Stripe checkout	No	Processing payment
Client site you were paid to build	No	Paid to create the site
Open source project docs site	Yes	No financial gain
Startup marketing site pre-revenue	No	Advertising a product for sale
University assignment or learning project	Yes	Personal use

That “pre-revenue startup” row surprises people. You do not need to be making money for the site to be commercial. Advertising the sale of a product is enough. A landing page for a SaaS you plan to charge for is commercial on day one.

Vercel’s guidance if you are unsure is to contact support and ask. The realistic enforcement picture: nobody is running a bot that scans your DOM for Stripe buttons on Monday morning. But building a revenue-generating business on a plan whose terms exclude revenue-generating businesses is not a foundation. It is a countdown you cannot see.

I learned the “read the terms” lesson the expensive way. As a teenager I burned through roughly $300 of savings on paid-to-click sites, survey sites, and PayPal money generators that all had one thing in common: I never read what the terms actually promised. Free hosting is not a scam. But the same instinct applies: the fine print is where the platform tells you when it will stop working for you.

If your project makes money, or is meant to, budget the $20.

Hosting, domains, and SSL

Free hosting. Hobby hosts static sites, SPAs, hybrid and server-rendered apps, and API routes on Vercel’s global CDN with automatic CI/CD from GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

Free .vercel.app subdomain. Every project. HTTPS from the first deploy.

Custom domains. Free to connect. 50 domains per project on Hobby (compared to Render’s 2 on its Hobby workspace). You still need to register the domain name at a registrar. Nobody gives away a .com.

Free SSL. Automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates for both `.vercel.app` and custom domains.

Never allowed on any plan (free or paid): proxies, VPNs, media hot-linking, scrapers, crypto mining, unauthorized load testing, penetration testing.

Is the Vercel free tier enough for a real site

For a personal portfolio with normal traffic: yes, easily. 100 GB transfer is enough for most portfolios to survive being on the front page of Hacker News. 1M edge requests is enough for a small blog even in a viral month. Free SSL, custom domains, and CI/CD are the baseline.

Where the free tier stops being enough:

Multi-developer team. One seat. Full stop.
Any commercial revenue. Rule violation regardless of usage.
Business-critical uptime. One-hour log retention makes 3am debugging painful.
Heavy build workflow. One concurrent build queues everything.
API-heavy backend. 4 CPU-hours a month burns fast on any real workload.
Multi-region latency requirements. Hobby is single-region for functions.

Does Vercel have a free database

Not a native one. Vercel deprecated Postgres and KV in favour of partnerships with Neon, Supabase, and Upstash. Each has its own free tier. Neon’s free tier is generous for Postgres. Upstash’s is generous for Redis. You connect them via environment variables. That is the pattern Vercel now expects.

Backend, functions, and cron on the free plan

Vercel Functions. Free within the 1M invocations, 4 CPU-hours, 360 GB-hours limits. Max duration 300 seconds. Single region only.

Cron jobs. Free but limited to once per day per job on Hobby. Pro lifts to once per minute. If you need frequent scheduled work, Hobby is not the plan.

Vercel Sandbox. 5 CPU-hours per month free, 10 concurrent sandboxes. Enough for lightweight isolated code execution but not for anything at scale.

Vercel AI (v0, AI Gateway, Vercel Agent, MCP)

v0.dev. Free tier: 3 messages per day. Enough to try the tool. Not enough to build with. Paid plans start at $20/month.

AI Gateway. Free to use, you pay for the model tokens you route through it.

Vercel MCP. Free.

Vercel Agent. Currently free during beta. Expected to move to paid.

AI SDK. Free open-source library. You bring the model provider.

The free tier vs Netlify, Render, Cloudflare Pages

Feature	Vercel Hobby	Netlify Free	Render Free	Cloudflare Pages
Bandwidth / month	100 GB	100 GB	100 GB	Unlimited
Build minutes	45-min max builds, unlimited	300 min	500 min	500 builds
Concurrent builds	1	1	1	1
Function invocations	1M	125K	Included in web service	100K
Custom domains	50 per project	Unlimited	2	Unlimited
Free SSL	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Team seats	1	1	1	1
Commercial use allowed	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database included	No	No	Free Postgres, 30-day expiry	No

Cloudflare Pages is the free-tier value leader if you can live inside Workers for compute. Unlimited bandwidth is genuinely rare.

Netlify allows commercial use on its free tier, which is the biggest single differentiator from Vercel for indie developers.

Render includes a free Postgres, but with a 30-day timer.

Vercel has the most generous edge-request allowance and the best DX for Next.js specifically. Commercial-use restriction is the tradeoff.

When to upgrade from Hobby to Pro

Concrete signals it is time:

You start making money from it. Do not wait for the enforcement email that may or may not come. Move to Pro when you invoice.
You need collaborators. Hobby is one seat.
You cannot debug at 8am because logs are gone. 1-hour retention is the pain.
Concurrent builds start queuing every day. Wasted developer time is more expensive than $20.
Cron once a day is not enough. Pro’s per-minute cron unlocks scheduled workflows.
You need multi-region function deployment. Latency matters for a global audience.

Setting up a free Vercel project well

Import from GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket. CI/CD is automatic.
Set up Vercel DNS if you want free integrated DNS. Not required.
Configure Web Analytics. Free 50K events per month. Better than adding a third-party analytics script.
Set environment variables in the project settings, not in code.
Add a `vercel.json` if you need custom routing or rewrites. Optional.
Do not use `.env` files in production. Use Vercel’s secret storage.

Is Vercel free tier safe and legit

Yes. Vercel is a mainstream, well-funded platform (Series E, several billion in valuation) with millions of active projects. The free tier is a genuine free tier, not a bait-and-switch. The credit-card question (“will they surprise-bill me”) is answered by Vercel’s own docs: Hobby cannot be charged. If you want to be extra safe, do not add a payment method at all, then even a support-side mistake could not bill you.

The honest bottom line: Vercel Hobby is one of the most generous free tiers in web hosting for a personal, non-commercial project. It is not the plan for a commercial site. If your project has any commercial intent, budget the $20 from day one and stop worrying about the terms of service. That is not upselling, it is what the licence says.

For alternative hosting comparisons and the AI stack that sits on top, best AI tools covers vetted picks in adjacent categories.