February 1, 2026 (3mo ago)
Written by Temps Team
Last updated March 31, 2026 (1mo ago)
Vercel delivers genuine value — world-class DX, a global edge network, instant preview deployments, and zero-config CI/CD. But that convenience has a price. According to Vercel's pricing page, Pro costs $20 per seat per month, with bandwidth overage at $0.15/GB after 1TB and separate charges for serverless functions and image optimizations. A 5-person team pays between $100 and $505/month depending on traffic — and that's before adding analytics or error tracking. Vercel's pricing changed significantly in September 2025, making most online breakdowns outdated.
Want the full Pro plan breakdown? See: Vercel Pro plan pricing 2026 — per-seat costs, bandwidth, function billing, and real-world bills at 10k/100k/1M MAU
This guide breaks down exactly what a five-person team pays on Vercel in 2026, with real formulas you can plug your own numbers into. We also show how self-hosting can cut that bill by 80-95% — though it comes with trade-offs in operational responsibility that are worth understanding before you make the switch.
TL;DR: Vercel Pro costs $20/seat/month. A 5-person team pays $100-505/mo depending on bandwidth and function usage. Self-hosting the same stack on a Hetzner Cloud VPS starting at EUR 3.79/mo can cut that by 80-95%, though you're trading money for operational responsibility.
According to Vercel's pricing page, Pro starts at $20 per seat per month. That's the base — before bandwidth, serverless function invocations, or any add-ons. For a team of five, you're looking at $100/month just for access.
Here's the current pricing structure after the September 2025 restructuring:
| Line item | Included with Pro | Overage rate |
|---|---|---|
| Seats | — | $20/seat/month |
| Bandwidth | 1 TB/month | $0.15/GB |
| Serverless function duration | 1,000 GB-hours | $0.18/GB-hour |
| Edge function invocations | 10 million | $2/million |
| Build minutes | 3,000 min/month | Varies by plan |
| Image optimizations | 5,000/month | $5/1,000 |
The biggest shift was bandwidth pricing. Vercel moved from $40/100GB to a 1TB included allowance with $0.15/GB overages. That's actually cheaper for most teams. But the per-seat cost stayed at $20, and serverless pricing got more granular.
We've tracked Vercel's pricing page changes through the Wayback Machine since 2023. The September 2025 update was the third major restructuring in two years — each one adding new billable dimensions while adjusting base allocations.
A five-person team with moderate traffic pays between $100 and $505 per month on Vercel Pro. The range depends almost entirely on bandwidth and serverless function usage. Seat costs are fixed and predictable.
Here's a formula you can use with your own numbers:
Monthly cost = (team_size x $20)
+ max(0, bandwidth_gb - 1000) x $0.15
+ max(0, function_gb_hours - 1000) x $0.18
+ max(0, edge_invocations - 10_000_000) x $0.000002
Low traffic (50K visitors/month, ~30GB bandwidth):
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 5 seats | $100 |
| Bandwidth (30GB) | $0 (under 1TB) |
| Functions | $0 (under limit) |
| Total | $100/month |
Medium traffic (250K visitors/month, ~200GB bandwidth):
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 5 seats | $100 |
| Bandwidth (200GB) | $0 (under 1TB) |
| Functions (moderate API) | ~$25 |
| Total | ~$125/month |
High traffic (2M visitors/month, ~3.7TB bandwidth):
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 5 seats | $100 |
| Bandwidth (2,700GB over) | $405 |
| Functions (heavy API) | ~$50+ |
| Total | ~$505+/month |
The jump from medium to high traffic is steep. That's where self-hosting starts to look attractive. But is it really worth the trade-off?
Preview deployments on Vercel Pro don't incur a separate per-deployment charge, but as the Vercel docs explain, they consume shared build minutes from your 3,000-minute monthly allowance. For teams practicing trunk-based development with frequent PRs, this adds up faster than you'd expect.
Each preview deployment triggers a full build. A Next.js app that takes 3 minutes to build, with 10 PRs per day across a 5-person team, burns through roughly 1,000 build minutes per month — just for previews.
Preview deployments also consume bandwidth and serverless function invocations when reviewers access them. If your QA team hammers preview URLs with automated tests, those resources count against your Pro allowance.
Most Vercel cost calculators ignore preview deployment consumption entirely. In our experience tracking build logs across multiple teams, preview deployments account for 20-40% of total build minute usage. That's a significant blind spot in most cost projections.
Here's a quick estimate for a team generating 200 preview deployments per month:
| Resource | Preview consumption | Cost impact |
|---|---|---|
| Build minutes | ~600 min (3 min avg) | $0 if under 3,000 total |
| Bandwidth | ~50GB (QA + review) | $0 if under 1TB total |
| Functions | Minimal | Negligible |
The cost is zero until you hit your plan limits. Then it compounds with your production usage.
That $46,485 Vercel bill that went viral on Medium wasn't a fluke — it was a predictable outcome of usage-based pricing without guardrails. To their credit, Vercel has since added spend management tools, but the fundamental pricing model still scales linearly with traffic.
1. Viral traffic spikes. A single Hacker News front-page appearance can generate 500K+ page views in 24 hours. At $0.15/GB overage, a spike that serves 2TB of unoptimized assets costs $150 in bandwidth alone — plus whatever serverless functions those visitors trigger.
2. Misconfigured serverless functions. Long-running functions, retry loops, or missing cache headers can multiply invocations by 10-100x. One poorly cached API route serving personalized data can cost more than your entire team's seat fees.
3. Image optimization overages. The 5,000/month limit sounds generous until you realize every unique image variant counts separately. A product catalog with 500 items, each rendered at 4 responsive sizes, hits 2,000 optimizations just from crawlers.
Vercel now offers spend alerts and hard limits on some resources. But the core question remains: do you want your infrastructure costs tied directly to your traffic, or decoupled from it?
We've seen teams set Vercel spend caps, only to discover their previews stopped deploying mid-sprint because they hit the limit. Spend management works, but it introduces a new failure mode — your deployment pipeline halting when you need it most.
Self-hosting a comparable deployment stack starts at EUR 3.79/month for a Hetzner CX22 VPS — roughly 95% less than a 5-person Vercel Pro plan. According to a Market.us report, the self-hosting platform market is projected to grow from $15.6 billion to $85.2 billion by 2033, with cost savings cited as the primary driver.
Here's what a self-hosted stack looks like:
| Component | Vercel Pro (5 seats) | Self-hosted VPS |
|---|---|---|
| Base cost | $100/month | EUR 3.79-15.99/month |
| Bandwidth (1TB) | Included | 20TB included |
| Extra bandwidth | $0.15/GB | ~EUR 1/TB |
| Analytics | Extra ($) | Open-source (free) |
| Error tracking | Extra ($) | Self-hosted Sentry (free) |
| Monitoring | Extra ($) | Open-source (free) |
| Typical total | $100-505/month | EUR 4-20/month |
But cost isn't the whole picture. What are you trading?
You'll need to handle updates, security patches, SSL certificate renewal, backup configuration, and incident response. For a solo developer, that's 2-5 hours per month. For a team with good automation, it's less.
37signals (the company behind Basecamp and HEY) saved $7 million over five years after leaving the cloud. But they also hired a dedicated infrastructure team. The math works differently at every scale.
According to a Barclays CIO Survey, 86% of CIOs plan some form of cloud repatriation by 2027. Cost predictability — not just cost reduction — is the primary motivation cited.
Heroku's February 2026 pricing restructuring reminded developers that platform economics can shift overnight. When a platform changes its pricing model, your budget projections break — and migration under pressure is always harder than migration by choice.
Heroku went from a generous free tier to paid-only. Netlify reworked its bandwidth pricing twice in 18 months. Vercel's September 2025 restructuring changed billing dimensions entirely. These aren't edge cases; they're the pattern.
The risk compounds when your deployment tooling is tightly coupled to a platform. Vercel-specific features like Edge Config, Cron Jobs, and Blob Storage create dependencies that make migration progressively harder over time.
Keep your architecture portable. Stick to standard Docker containers when possible. Use environment variables instead of platform-specific configuration stores. Test your application locally with next start regularly to confirm it runs outside Vercel's runtime.
This isn't anti-Vercel advice. It's anti-lock-in advice that applies to every managed platform.
According to Market.us, the self-hosting software market is projected to grow from $15.6 billion to $85.2 billion by 2033. That growth reflects real demand from teams seeking cost control and data ownership. Here are the main alternatives worth evaluating.
Coolify is an open-source, self-hosted alternative that handles Docker deployments with a web UI. It's free but requires you to manage the server and set up monitoring, analytics, and error tracking separately.
Temps bundles deployment, analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring into a single binary. Self-hosting is free; managed hosting on Hetzner starts around EUR 6/month. It's a good fit if you want Vercel-style DX without assembling multiple tools.
CapRover and Dokku are lighter-weight options for teams comfortable with more manual configuration.
Railway offers usage-based pricing starting at $5/month with a simpler billing model than Vercel. It supports Docker-based deployments but lacks built-in analytics or monitoring.
Cloudflare Pages provides generous free tier bandwidth and pairs well with Cloudflare Workers for edge compute. The trade-off is tighter coupling to Cloudflare's ecosystem.
Render offers straightforward pricing with free SSL and managed PostgreSQL. Good for teams that want managed simplicity without Vercel-scale costs.
If cost predictability matters most, self-hosting wins. If you want zero operational overhead, a managed platform with transparent pricing (Railway, Render) is the pragmatic middle ground. If you need built-in observability alongside deployments, evaluate Temps or assemble your own stack with Coolify plus Plausible plus Sentry.
According to Vercel's pricing page, Vercel Pro costs $20 per seat per month with 1 TB bandwidth included. Overages are $0.15/GB for bandwidth and $0.18/GB-hour for serverless functions. A solo developer stays under $30/month with light traffic. A 5-person team pays $100-505/month depending on usage.
Vercel Pro's per-seat model means monthly cost scales linearly with team size at $20/seat. A 5-person team pays $100/month in seats alone. Add bandwidth and function overages for the full picture. There's no team discount or volume pricing on Pro.
Preview deployments don't carry a separate charge but consume shared build minutes, bandwidth, and function invocations from your Pro allowance. A team generating 200 previews/month at 3 minutes each uses ~600 of the 3,000 included build minutes.
Self-hosting on a Hetzner CX22 VPS starts at EUR 3.79/month with 20TB bandwidth. That's 80-95% cheaper than Vercel Pro for a 5-person team. 37signals reported saving $7 million over five years after leaving cloud platforms. The trade-off is operational responsibility.
Vercel restructured pricing in September 2025, replacing the $40/100GB bandwidth model with 1TB included and $0.15/GB overages. This reduced costs for most mid-traffic sites but increased the base per-seat price's share of total spend. High-traffic sites still face significant overage charges.
Related guides:
Pricing data reflects rates as of March 2026. Verify current pricing on each platform's website before making infrastructure decisions.