Vercel Pricing 2026: Hobby vs Pro, Limits and Real Costs

Updated September 22, 2026 · 12 min read

Vercel Hobby is free, Pro starts at $20 a month. Here is what a simple HTML site, a client site, or a small agency actually pays.

Short answer: Vercel pricing has three plans. Hobby costs $0 but is limited to non-commercial personal use. Pro costs $20 per month, which includes one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit; each extra deploying seat is $20. Enterprise is custom-priced. A freelancer paid to build a client site needs Pro (Vercel docs, checked September 2026).

In this guide

Vercel pricing at a glance: Hobby, Pro and Enterprise
The Vercel Hobby plan: free, but personal use only
The Vercel Pro plan: $20 platform fee, seats and usage credit
What a static site really costs on Vercel: three scenarios
Vercel Drop and Vercel Domains: two extras that change the math
When Vercel pricing is worth it, and when it’s overkill
Cheaper alternatives to Vercel for static sites
Where sofast fits
Frequently asked questions

Most pages about Vercel pricing are written for developers running Next.js apps with serverless functions. This guide is for designers, freelancers and small agencies with a static HTML/CSS site, hand-coded or made with an AI tool. The questions are simple. What will Vercel cost you, and which plan are you allowed to use? Every figure below comes from Vercel’s official documentation, checked in September 2026.

Vercel pricing at a glance: Hobby, Pro and Enterprise

Vercel sells three plans. The table below summarizes Vercel pricing from its docs and vercel.com/pricing (checked September 2026). The key differences are commercial use, team seats, and what happens at the limits.

	Hobby	Pro	Enterprise
Price	$0, free forever	$20/month platform fee	Custom pricing
Deploying seats	1 seat	1 included; extra seats $20/month each	Custom
Viewer (read-only) seats	Not available	Free, unlimited	Custom
Included usage	100 GB Fast Data Transfer, 1M Edge Requests, 10 GB Fast Origin Transfer, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU-hours	$20 monthly usage credit + Flat Rate CDN (1M CDN requests, 1 TB transfer)	Custom
Commercial use	Not allowed	Allowed	Allowed
Custom domains	Yes, 50 per project	Unlimited per project	Yes
Projects	200	Unlimited	Custom
Deployments per day	100	6,000	Custom
Over the limit	Feature paused, usually for 30 days; no bill	Billed on-demand after the credit	Contract terms
Uptime SLA	None stated	None stated	99.99% SLA

Prices are in US dollars and exclude taxes such as value-added tax (VAT).

In plain terms: A “deploying seat” is a team member who can publish or change projects. A “viewer seat” can only look at deployments, analytics and previews.

Vercel’s domain documentation allows 50 custom domains per project on Hobby (Vercel domain docs, checked September 23, 2026). Every domain also gets a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, renewed 14 to 30 days before it expires (Vercel SSL docs, checked September 2026).

In plain terms: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the certificate that puts the padlock and “https” in front of your address.

The Vercel Hobby plan: free, but personal use only

The Vercel Hobby plan costs $0 and never expires. Each month, it includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1,000,000 Edge Requests and 10 GB of Fast Origin Transfer. For a small static HTML site, those numbers are generous. The real limit of Hobby is not technical. It is the license: what you are allowed to use it for. We cover that question in more depth in our guide is Vercel free for your project.

Hobby also has hard account limits: 200 projects, 100 deployments per day, 1 concurrent build, 45 minutes per build, and 1 seat (Vercel limits, checked September 2026). One seat means no team: if two people need to publish, Hobby does not fit.

What Vercel counts as commercial use

Vercel’s fair use guidelines are explicit: “Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan.” Vercel then defines commercial usage as any deployment “used for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code” (fair use guidelines, checked September 2026).

Vercel gives five examples of commercial use:

“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”

Vercel adds one exception: “Asking for Donations does not fall under commercial usage.” If you are unsure, Vercel asks you to contact its support team.

Why the rule matters for freelancers

The third example is the one freelancers miss. “Receiving payment to create, update, or host the site” makes a paid client site commercial. It does not matter that the site is a plain HTML page with no shop. If anyone in the production was paid, Hobby is off the table. So a freelancer like Julien, who delivers a landing page to a local bakery, needs Pro for that site.

The second example also deserves attention. A portfolio that promotes your paid design services could count as advertising a service. A purely personal site, a school project or a hobby blog without ads is clearly fine on Hobby. Anything in between is a judgment call, so ask Vercel support before you rely on Hobby.

What happens when you hit the Hobby limits

Vercel never sends a surprise bill to a Hobby team. The Hobby docs say: “In most cases, 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” (checked September 2026).

For a personal site, that is a safe design: the worst case is a pause, never a bill. For a client site, a 30-day pause would be a serious problem.

The Vercel Pro plan: $20 platform fee, seats and usage credit

The Vercel Pro plan is billed monthly. Its base is a $20/month platform fee. That fee includes one deploying seat and $20 of monthly usage credit (Vercel Pro plan docs, updated September 15, 2026). The credit covers infrastructure usage from the first unit. Unused credit expires at the end of the month and does not roll over.

Pro also includes the lowest tier of Vercel’s Flat Rate CDN: 1 million CDN requests and 1 TB of transfer per month. A static HTML site mostly uses exactly these two resources. Pro also brings unlimited projects, unlimited domains per project, 6,000 deployments per day, and email support.

In plain terms: A CDN (content delivery network) is a set of servers worldwide that keep copies of your files.

How Vercel Pro pricing works for a team

Vercel Pro pricing scales with people, not with sites. Each additional deploying seat, with the Owner or Member role, costs $20 per month. Viewer seats are free and unlimited. Viewers can see deployments, check analytics and comment on previews. They cannot configure or deploy projects.

For an agency like Studio Marchand, this is the number that matters. Every designer who publishes adds $20 a month. Clients who only review previews can be viewers at no cost. One add-on is worth knowing: Password Protection costs $20 per month per protected project, which agencies may want for private client previews.

Overage, on-demand billing and the $200 spend alert

Once the $20 credit is used, Vercel bills extra usage on-demand. For example, function invocations cost $0.60 per million beyond the credit. Data transfer beyond the Flat Rate CDN capacity is priced by region, per Vercel’s regional pricing page (checked September 2026).

Vercel notifies you when usage reaches 75% of the monthly credit. After that, you receive daily and weekly usage emails. By default, spend management notifications trigger at $200 per billing cycle for new customers. You can set a lower threshold and automatic actions in the spend management settings. Doing that on day one is the simplest way to avoid surprises.

In plain terms: On-demand billing means you pay for usage beyond the included amount, like a phone plan that charges for extra data.

What a static site really costs on Vercel: three scenarios

The scenarios below are estimates, not quotes. They use only Vercel’s published prices, checked September 2026, before taxes, add-ons and on-demand usage. They assume a small static site that stays within the included usage. A site with heavy traffic or server functions could cost more.

Scenario 1 — personal site on Hobby: $0 per month. Imagine a designer who publishes a personal side project. It has no ads, no shop and no paid services. The Vercel Hobby plan is free and allowed here. Estimated cost: $0 per month. If traffic exceeds the included usage, the feature pauses and no bill arrives.

Scenario 2 — freelancer hosting one paid client site: $20 per month. Imagine Julien is paid to build and host a client’s landing page. That is commercial use, so Pro is required. Estimated cost: $20 per month, or $240 per year. Because Vercel pricing is per seat, a second client site on the same Pro team adds no platform fee. It only adds usage, which the credit and Flat Rate CDN may cover.

Scenario 3 — three-person agency with three deploying seats: $60 per month base. Imagine Studio Marchand has three designers who all publish sites. The platform fee covers the first seat ($20), and two extra seats add $40. Estimated base cost: $60 per month, or $720 per year. The team still receives one $20 usage credit, not three.

Scenario	Plan	Seats	Estimated monthly cost	Estimated yearly cost
Personal, non-commercial site	Hobby	1	$0	$0
Freelancer, 1 paid client site	Pro	1 deploying	$20	$240
Agency, 3 people who deploy	Pro	3 deploying	$60	$720

Vercel Drop and Vercel Domains: two extras that change the math

Vercel Drop launched on June 12, 2026. You drag a file, folder or .zip onto vercel.com/drop, and Vercel deploys it without Git or a command line (CLI). Drop requires a Vercel account. Each drop creates a new project; a drop cannot update an existing project (Vercel Drop docs, checked September 2026). Drop does not change the plan rules: a client site uploaded with Drop still needs Pro.

The “new project per drop” rule matters for repeat edits. Fix a typo, drop the folder again, and you get a second project. You then move your custom domain to it. On Hobby, each drop also counts toward the 200-project limit.

Vercel Domains sells domain names “at registrar cost, with savings up to 50% on popular TLDs” (Vercel changelog, September 25, 2025). A TLD (top-level domain) is the ending, like .com or .dev. Paid Pro teams also get one free first-year domain on selected TLDs, such as .app, .dev or .site. It renews at the standard rate after year one. The offer is not available during a Pro trial.

When Vercel pricing is worth it, and when it’s overkill

For some projects, the $20 is easy to justify. Vercel is the company behind Next.js, the popular React framework. It creates a preview URL for every Git branch, so teams review changes before they go live. It also runs server functions for forms, APIs and dynamic pages. If your project uses those features, Vercel pricing buys real value.

A static HTML/CSS site uses almost none of this. It needs file storage, a CDN, a domain and SSL. If you are unsure which kind of site you have, read our explainer on static vs dynamic websites.

Use this decision list:

Is the site personal, with no ads and no paid work involved? Vercel Hobby is free and allowed.
Were you paid to create, update or host the site? You need Vercel Pro at $20 a month, or another host that allows commercial use.
Do several people need to publish? On Vercel, budget $20 per extra deploying seat. Compare with hosts that do not charge per seat.
Does the site use Next.js, server functions or branch previews? Vercel is likely worth it. Its developer tools are the reason to pay.
Is it a plain HTML/CSS site from a designer or an AI tool? Vercel works, but you pay for features you won’t use.

For a side-by-side view of the three big developer platforms, see our comparison of Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages.

Cheaper alternatives to Vercel for static sites

If Vercel pricing feels high for a static site, several hosts cost less or charge differently. Figures come from each platform’s official pages, checked September 2026.

Host	Free plan	Paid entry price	Team pricing	Custom domain on free	At the free limit
Vercel	Hobby, $0	Pro $20/month	$20 per extra deploying seat	Yes (50 per project)	Feature paused, usually 30 days
Netlify	$0, 300 credits/month	Personal $9/month; Pro from $20/month	Pro: unlimited members, flat price	Yes	All sites paused until next cycle
Cloudflare Pages / Workers	$0, unlimited sites, seats, requests and bandwidth	Workers Paid from $5/month per account	No per-seat charge	Yes (100 per project)	No bandwidth cap; 20,000 files, 25 MiB per file
GitHub Pages	$0 with public repositories	Paid GitHub plan for private repositories	Per GitHub plan	Yes	Soft limits: 1 GB site, 100 GB/month bandwidth
sofast	$0: 1 site, 50 MB, subdomain	Starter $5/month (billed annually)	See pricing page	No (paid plans only)	1 site, 50 MB storage

Netlify moved new accounts to credit-based plans in September 2025. The Free plan gives 300 credits per month as a hard limit. A production deploy costs 15 credits and each GB of bandwidth costs 20. Netlify Pro starts at $20 per month with unlimited members. For teams, that flat price beats Vercel’s per-seat model (Netlify docs, checked September 2026). Our Netlify pricing guide walks through the credit math.

Cloudflare Pages says “All plans come with unlimited sites, seats, requests, and bandwidth.” The free plan allows 20,000 files per site and 25 MiB per file. Pages is still supported, but Cloudflare recommends Workers for new projects. On Workers, “requests to static assets are free and unlimited” (Cloudflare docs, checked September 2026). Our guide to what Cloudflare Pages is explains the difference.

GitHub Pages is free with public repositories. Sites can be up to 1 GB, with a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month. However, GitHub does not allow Pages “to run your online business, e-commerce site,” or commercial software as a service (GitHub docs, checked September 2026). Our free static website hosting guide ranks more free options.

Still comparing? Browse our full list of Vercel alternatives, with the strengths and limits of each host.

Where sofast fits

sofast hosts static HTML sites by drag-and-drop upload. There is no Git and no command line, SSL is automatic, and the free plan includes 50 MB and a sofast subdomain. sofast is built on Cloudflare’s global network. It targets designers, freelancers and small agencies with a finished HTML/CSS site. You drag a folder or a ZIP file into the browser, and the site is live.

Compared with Vercel, sofast is simpler and cheaper for plain static sites. The Free plan costs $0, needs no credit card and, unlike Vercel Hobby, allows commercial use. Paid plans start at $5 per month for Starter, $10 for Pro and $20 for Large, billed annually (monthly billing is $6, $12 and $24). Custom domains start on Starter. See the sofast pricing page for plan details.

sofast also has clear limits. There is no Git workflow, no branch previews, no build step and no server-side functions. The free plan allows one site and 50 MB, and a custom domain needs a paid plan. sofast is also a new service. If you build with Next.js or need serverless code, Vercel is the better tool.

Frequently asked questions

What are the limitations of Vercel?

Vercel’s free Hobby plan is limited to non-commercial personal use and one seat. It allows 200 projects, 100 deployments per day, one concurrent build and 45 minutes per build. Included usage is 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and 1 million Edge Requests per month. If you exceed Hobby limits, the feature usually pauses for 30 days. Pro removes most limits but charges $20 per deploying seat (Vercel docs, checked September 2026).

What is cheaper than Vercel?

For static sites, several hosts cost less than Vercel Pro at $20 per month. Cloudflare Pages is free with unlimited sites, seats, requests and bandwidth. GitHub Pages is free with public repositories, but it forbids running an online business. Netlify Personal costs $9 per month. sofast has a free plan and paid plans from $5 per month billed annually. Prices checked September 2026.

Is Vercel really expensive?

Vercel is free for personal projects on Hobby, and Pro costs $20 per month with $20 of usage credit. For one freelancer, that is $240 per year. Cost rises with people: each extra deploying seat adds $20 per month. A three-person agency pays about $60 per month before usage and taxes. For a plain static site, that can feel expensive compared with free or $5 hosts.

How much does Vercel Pro cost for a team?

Vercel Pro costs a $20 monthly platform fee that includes one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit. Each additional deploying seat costs $20 per month. Viewer seats, which can review previews but not deploy, are free and unlimited. A team of three people who deploy pays an estimated $60 per month, plus any usage beyond the credit (Vercel Pro docs, checked September 2026).

Can I use Vercel Hobby for a client website?

No. Vercel’s fair use guidelines restrict Hobby to non-commercial personal use. They list “Receiving payment to create, update, or host the site” as commercial use. A freelancer paid to build a client site therefore needs Vercel Pro or Enterprise. This applies even to a simple HTML page with no shop and no ads (Vercel fair use guidelines, checked September 2026).

Does Vercel charge for bandwidth?

On Hobby, Vercel never charges: 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer is included each month, and usage pauses if you exceed it. On Pro, the Flat Rate CDN includes 1 TB of data transfer and 1 million CDN requests per month. Beyond that, and after the $20 credit, transfer is billed on-demand at regional rates. Spend alerts default to $200 per billing cycle (Vercel docs, checked September 2026).

Is there a yearly plan for Vercel?

Vercel’s Pro plan documentation describes monthly billing only: the plan “is billed monthly” based on deploying seats, add-ons and on-demand usage. We found no self-serve annual Pro plan in Vercel’s docs (checked September 2026). Enterprise uses custom pricing, so longer contracts are negotiated directly with Vercel’s sales team.

Which is cheaper, Vercel or AWS?

It depends on traffic and on your time. Amazon Web Services (AWS) bills storage, content delivery and domain services separately, with no flat plan like Vercel Pro. You also configure those services yourself. We don’t publish AWS figures here because the total depends on each setup. For a small static site, a free static host is usually simpler than either.

Sources

Written by the sofast team.

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Written by sofast Team.

Vercel Pricing in 2026: Hobby vs Pro, Limits, and What a Static Site Really Costs