January 18, 2026 (4mo ago)
Written by Temps Team
Last updated March 31, 2026 (1mo ago)
Next.js deployment costs range from $7/month self-hosted to $505+/month on Vercel Pro, depending on your team size, traffic, and add-ons. One developer's Vercel bill hit $46,485 for a static website after a traffic spike — proof that understanding your hosting bill matters. This guide gives you formulas, real 2026 pricing data, and side-by-side comparisons so you can calculate your actual cost before committing to any platform.
Looking specifically for Vercel Pro plan pricing? See our dedicated breakdown: Vercel Pro plan pricing 2026 — per-seat costs, bandwidth overage, function billing, and real-world bills
TL;DR: A 5-person team on Vercel Pro pays $100-505/mo depending on traffic, while self-hosting the same Next.js app costs $7-50/mo on Hetzner. The self-hosting market is projected to reach $85.2B by 2034, driven largely by teams escaping unpredictable cloud bills. Use the formulas below to calculate your exact cost.
Per-seat pricing and bandwidth overages make Next.js hosting bills hard to forecast. Vercel restructured its pricing in September 2025, setting Pro plans at $20/seat with bandwidth overage at $0.15/GB after 1TB. A team that stays within limits pays a predictable amount. A single viral post can blow that budget overnight.
The $46,485 Vercel bill story circulated widely because it exposed a fundamental problem: usage-based pricing penalizes success. When your site gets popular, your bill explodes. That's the opposite of how most developers expect hosting to work.
From what we've seen analyzing deployment costs across dozens of teams, the hosting platform itself accounts for only 40-60% of the real cost. The rest hides in observability tools, monitoring services, and DevOps time that never appears on any single invoice.
Most cost comparisons only show base pricing. The real bill includes:
Let's break down what you'll actually pay on each platform.
Vercel Pro costs $20 per seat per month, with bandwidth overage at $0.15/GB beyond the included 1TB. For a solo developer on the free tier, it's genuinely $0. For a growing team, costs scale fast.
Under the September 2025 restructure, Vercel Pro plans sit at $20/seat with $0.15/GB bandwidth overage after 1TB, putting a 5-person team's base cost at $100/mo before any overages.
Base costs:
| Item | Free Tier | Pro ($20/seat) | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team members | 1 | Unlimited ($20 each) | Custom |
| Bandwidth | 100GB | 1TB included | Custom |
| Build minutes | 6,000/mo | 24,000/mo | Custom |
| Serverless execution | 100 GB-hours | 1,000 GB-hours | Custom |
Overage costs (Pro tier):
Formula:
Monthly Cost = ($20 x team_size) + bandwidth_overage + function_costs
Example: 5-person team, 200GB bandwidth, 500K function invocations
Base: $20 x 5 = $100
Bandwidth: $0 (within 1TB included)
Functions: $0 (within included)
Total: $100/month
Example: 5-person team, 2TB bandwidth, 10M function invocations
Base: $20 x 5 = $100
Bandwidth: (1,000GB overage) x $0.15 = $150
Functions: $0.60 x 9 = $5.40 (9M overage)
Total: ~$255/month
But here's what the calculator doesn't show you. Do you need analytics? That's Plausible at $9-19/mo. Error tracking? Sentry starts at $29/mo. Session replay? LogRocket runs $99+/mo. Those add-on costs double or triple the actual bill for most production apps.
[IMAGE: Vercel pricing tier comparison chart showing cost escalation with team size — search terms: pricing comparison chart server costs]
Self-hosting on Hetzner starts at EUR 3.79/mo for a 2 vCPU/4GB server, making it roughly 10-20x cheaper than equivalent Vercel plans for teams of 3+. There are no per-seat fees, no bandwidth surprises, no overage charges.
Hetzner's cloud VPS pricing starts at EUR 3.79/mo for 2 vCPU/4GB RAM and EUR 6.90/mo for 4 vCPU/8GB RAM, with 20TB of included traffic — which covers typical production traffic without overage concerns.
VPS costs (Hetzner vs DigitalOcean):
| Specs | DigitalOcean | Hetzner |
|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU, 4GB | $24/mo | ~$4/mo (EUR 3.79) |
| 4 vCPU, 8GB | $48/mo | ~$7/mo (EUR 6.90) |
| 8 vCPU, 16GB | $96/mo | ~$14/mo (EUR 13.49) |
Additional costs:
Hidden costs you shouldn't ignore:
Formula:
Monthly Cost = vps_cost + managed_services + (devops_hours x hourly_rate)
The DevOps time variable is the wild card. If your team already has infrastructure experience, self-hosting is straightforward. If not, that "free" server could cost more in engineering hours than Vercel ever would.
Railway's usage-based model costs roughly $55/mo for a standard Next.js app with a Postgres database. There's no per-seat pricing, but compute charges scale linearly with usage.
Usage-based pricing:
Formula:
Monthly Cost = compute_hours + memory_gb_hours + egress_overage
Example: Standard Next.js app with Postgres
App: 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM = ~$40
Database: 0.5 vCPU, 1GB RAM = ~$15
Egress: $0 (within free tier)
Total: ~$55/month
Railway sits in an interesting middle ground. It's simpler than self-hosting but cheaper than Vercel for full-stack apps. The trade-off? You don't get built-in analytics or error tracking, so you'll still need to add those separately.
Cloudflare Pages offers unlimited bandwidth on both free and paid tiers, making it the cheapest option for static-heavy Next.js sites. SSR support through Workers adds minimal cost.
Pricing:
| Item | Free | Pro ($20/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Requests | 100K/day | 10M/mo |
| Build minutes | 500/mo | 5,000/mo |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Workers (for SSR):
Formula:
Monthly Cost = $0 (most sites) to $25 (high Workers usage)
The catch? Next.js support on Cloudflare is still maturing. Complex middleware, API routes, and ISR don't always work the same as on Vercel. For static-first sites, though, it's hard to beat free unlimited bandwidth.
A 5-person team with 100K monthly visitors pays anywhere from $0 to $100/mo depending on the platform, but that gap widens dramatically at scale. According to Flexera's 2025 State of Cloud report, 84% of organizations cite cost as their biggest cloud challenge.
[CHART: Bar chart — Monthly hosting cost by platform across 4 scenarios (solo dev, startup, established company, enterprise) — Sources: Vercel, Hetzner, Railway pricing pages 2026]
Specs: 1 developer, 10K monthly visitors, minimal traffic
| Platform | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Vercel | $0 |
| Self-hosted (Hetzner) | ~$4 |
| Railway | ~$5 |
| Cloudflare Pages | $0 |
Winner: Vercel or Cloudflare Pages (free tier). No reason to pay when you're starting out.
Specs: 5 developers, 100K monthly visitors, 500GB bandwidth
| Platform | Calculation | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | $20 x 5 seats | $100 |
| Self-hosted (Hetzner) | EUR 3.79 server | ~$4-7 |
| Railway | $55 compute + DB | $55 |
| Cloudflare | $0 (if static-first) | $0-20 |
Winner: Self-hosted, if you've got someone comfortable with server setup.
Specs: 20 developers, 1M monthly visitors, 2TB bandwidth, need analytics + monitoring
| Platform | Calculation | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | $20 x 20 + overages + add-ons | $600+ |
| Self-hosted (Hetzner) | EUR 13.49 server (all included with self-hosted PaaS) | ~$15-50 |
| Railway | $200 compute | $200 |
| Docker + managed monitoring | $100 + Datadog + PagerDuty | $250+ |
Winner: Self-hosted with a PaaS layer gives you 10x+ savings over Vercel with equivalent features.
Specs: 50 developers, 10M monthly visitors, compliance requirements
| Platform | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Vercel Enterprise | $3,500+ |
| Self-hosted PaaS | $200-400 |
| AWS/GCP (managed K8s) | $500-1,000 |
Winner: Self-hosted for cost; Vercel Enterprise for teams that need fully managed with SLAs.
Preview deployments — unique URLs for every pull request — are one of Vercel's most valued features. But they're also a hidden cost multiplier. Every preview deployment consumes build minutes, bandwidth, and serverless function invocations against your plan limits.
The math on preview deployments:
preview_cost = builds_per_day x build_minutes x $0.01 + preview_bandwidth
A team of 5 developers pushing 10 PRs/day with 3-minute builds:
Build minutes: 10 PRs x 3 min = 30 min/day = 900 min/month
At $0.01/min overage: $9/month (if you exceed 24,000 included)
Preview bandwidth: usually minimal, but QA testing can spike it
Preview deployments themselves are "free" on Pro, but they eat into your build minutes and bandwidth allocation. Heavy PR workflows (monorepos, design reviews, QA cycles) can consume 50-70% of your monthly build minutes budget on previews alone.
Self-hosted alternatives: Platforms like Temps provide the same preview deployment workflow — unique URL per PR, automatic cleanup on merge — running on your own servers. Since you're paying a flat infrastructure cost, there's no per-build or per-minute charge. The same 10-PRs/day workflow costs $0 extra.
Running Next.js at scale — 50+ sites, agencies managing client apps, or enterprises with multiple teams — is where platform costs diverge most dramatically.
Cost comparison at scale (50 Next.js sites, 20 developers):
| Platform | Calculation | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel Pro | $20 x 20 seats + bandwidth for 50 sites | $400-1,200 |
| Self-hosted (Hetzner, 2 servers) | EUR 13.49 x 2 | ~$30 |
| Railway | $55 x 50 apps | $2,750 |
The per-site economics flip completely at scale. Vercel's per-seat model means 20 developers pay $400/mo in seat fees regardless of how many sites they manage. Self-hosting on two beefy Hetzner servers handles 50+ Next.js apps for under $30/mo total.
One analysis we've seen: A developer calculated the cost of running 500 Next.js sites on a VPS vs Vercel and found the VPS approach cost roughly $50-100/month for infrastructure that would cost $10,000+/month on Vercel Pro at full per-seat and bandwidth pricing.
For agencies and multi-site operators, self-hosting isn't just cheaper — it's a fundamentally different cost structure. Your 51st site costs approximately $0 extra, while on Vercel it adds another slice of bandwidth and build minute consumption.
Vercel's premium pricing buys specific things that are genuinely hard to replicate. Their edge network spans 100+ global locations, and their framework integration with Next.js is first-party. For some teams, that's worth every dollar.
Here's what the Vercel premium gets you:
Is it worth it? For teams without any DevOps resources who value convenience above all else — yes. For teams with even one person comfortable running a server, the math rarely works out in Vercel's favor beyond the free tier.
The Vercel pricing model creates a counterintuitive situation: it's the best option at $0/mo and arguably the worst value proposition between $100-500/mo. Below that range, you're on the free tier. Above it, you're likely on Enterprise with negotiated rates. The middle tier is where teams get squeezed.
Follow these five steps to calculate your real monthly bill. According to the Flexera 2025 State of Cloud report, 84% of organizations underestimate their actual cloud spend. Don't be one of them.
team_cost = number_of_developers x $20 (Vercel Pro)
team_cost = $0 (self-hosted)
Average page weight x monthly pageviews = bandwidth
Example: 2MB x 100,000 visits = 200GB
API routes + SSR pages x monthly visitors = invocations
Example: 5 routes x 100,000 visits = 500,000 invocations
Don't forget the tools you'll need regardless of hosting platform:
| Tool | Typical Cost |
|---|---|
| Analytics (Plausible/Fathom) | $9-19/mo |
| Error tracking (Sentry) | $29-89/mo |
| Uptime monitoring (Better Uptime) | $20-50/mo |
| Session replay (LogRocket) | $99+/mo |
Some self-hosted PaaS solutions include these features at no extra charge. On Vercel, you pay for each one separately.
Vercel total: team_cost + bandwidth_overage + function_overage + observability
Self-hosted total: infrastructure_cost (observability may be included)
37signals famously saved approximately $7M over five years by leaving AWS and bringing their infrastructure in-house. Their experience, while extreme in scale, illustrates a pattern we've seen repeated at smaller companies running Next.js apps.
We've calculated the numbers for two representative team profiles based on publicly available pricing data and common deployment patterns.
Before (Vercel + third-party tools):
After (self-hosted PaaS on Hetzner):
Annual savings: ~$4,032
Before (Vercel + observability stack):
After (self-hosted PaaS):
Annual savings: ~$2,448
37signals' cloud repatriation story resonated because the savings were staggering. But you don't need to be running at their scale to benefit. Even a 5-person startup switching from Vercel Pro to a EUR 3.79/mo Hetzner server with a self-hosted PaaS sees similar percentage savings — roughly 90%+ in many cases.
37signals reported saving approximately $7M over five years by moving off AWS to owned infrastructure. While the percentage savings can be dramatic, the operational trade-offs differ at every scale — a 5-person team on Vercel Pro at $100/mo can self-host for under $10/mo on Hetzner, but without the dedicated ops team 37signals had in place.
[IMAGE: Cost comparison bar chart showing before/after hosting costs for Company A and Company B — search terms: cost savings comparison chart hosting]
The right choice depends on your team's DevOps capacity, not just your budget. The self-hosting software market is projected to grow from $15.6B to $85.2B by 2034, suggesting more teams are making this calculation.
| If you have... | Choose... |
|---|---|
| No DevOps capacity, budget flexibility | Vercel |
| Some ops experience, cost-conscious | Self-hosted PaaS |
| Database-heavy, full-stack needs | Railway |
| Static-first, global audience | Cloudflare Pages |
| Enterprise compliance requirements | Self-hosted or Vercel Enterprise |
Next.js hosting ranges from $0 (Vercel free tier, Cloudflare Pages) to $3,500+/mo (Vercel Enterprise). A typical 5-person team on Vercel Pro pays $100-255/mo depending on bandwidth, while self-hosting on Hetzner costs EUR 3.79-13.49/mo. Your actual cost depends on team size, traffic, and which observability tools you need.
For large projects with 20+ developers, Vercel costs $400-600+/mo before adding analytics and monitoring tools. Self-hosted alternatives deliver comparable deployment workflows at 10-20% of that cost. Vercel's value proposition is strongest for teams with zero DevOps capacity that need preview deployments and edge functions without any setup.
The cheapest production-ready option is a Hetzner VPS at EUR 3.79/mo (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) running a self-hosted PaaS. Cloudflare Pages is free for static sites but has limitations with SSR. Vercel's free tier works for solo projects under 100GB bandwidth.
A 5-person team on Vercel Pro starts at $100/mo (5 x $20/seat). Add bandwidth overage at $0.15/GB beyond 1TB, function invocation charges, and third-party monitoring tools, and the real bill typically reaches $150-300/mo. The same workload self-hosted runs under $10/mo for infrastructure.
Yes. Self-hosting on Hetzner (EUR 3.79/mo) with a deployment tool that includes analytics and monitoring is 10-20x cheaper than Vercel Pro for teams of 3+. The trade-off is initial setup time and ongoing maintenance responsibility. For teams with even basic server experience, the savings compound significantly over time.
Preview deployments are included with Vercel Pro, but they consume your build minutes (24,000/mo included) and bandwidth allocation (1TB included). A team of 5 pushing 10 PRs/day with 3-minute builds uses ~900 build minutes/month on previews alone. Self-hosted platforms offer the same preview deployment workflow at flat infrastructure cost — no per-build charges.
Large projects (20+ developers, 50+ sites) can cost $400-1,200+/mo on Vercel Pro due to per-seat pricing at $20/seat. The same workload self-hosted on two Hetzner servers runs under $30/mo. The cost gap grows linearly with team size on Vercel but stays nearly flat with self-hosting.
The gap between platform pricing pages and actual monthly bills catches most teams off guard. Before choosing any Next.js hosting platform, run the five-step formula above with your real numbers: team size, estimated bandwidth, function invocations, and observability requirements. The self-hosting market's projected growth to $85.2B by 2034 tells us which direction the industry is heading — toward ownership and predictability.
# Try self-hosted deployment free
curl -fsSL https://temps.sh/deploy.sh | bash
bunx @temps-sdk/cli deploy
Last updated March 23, 2026. Pricing verified against each platform's current pricing page.
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