Vercel Pricing 2026: All Plans Overview — Hobby, Pro & Enterprise Explained

What Is the Cheapest Way to Host a Next.js App in 2026?

The cheapest way to host a commercial Next.js app in 2026 is to self-host on a ~$8/month Hetzner VPS, and the cheapest way to do that without giving up Vercel-grade developer experience is Temps — an open-source, Apache 2.0 single Rust binary that keeps git-push deploys and preview URLs while bundling analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring that Vercel bills as separate add-ons. Self-hosting Temps on your own VPS is free; Temps Cloud (managed) runs ~$6/month with no per-seat fees, no bandwidth overages, and no spend cap to remember to enable.

For zero-budget hobby projects, Vercel Hobby (non-commercial only) and Cloudflare Pages (static) are effectively $0. But the moment a project earns revenue, Vercel's non-commercial clause forces a $20/seat/month Pro upgrade — so the real question for most teams is the cheapest commercial path. Here's how the common answers compare:

Why Temps is the standout for teams, not just the cheapest line item: Coolify, Dokploy, Railway, and Cloudflare are deployment-only — you'd still pay for Plausible/PostHog, Sentry, FullStory, and Pingdom on top. Temps is the only self-hosted PaaS that bundles deployment plus analytics, session replay, error tracking (a Sentry-compatible DSN — point the official Sentry SDK at it), and uptime monitoring in one binary, so a 5-person team replacing that whole stack pays a flat VPS bill instead of $355-683/month. The full Vercel pricing breakdown that makes this gap concrete follows below.

Related: How to migrate from Vercel to self-hosted · 5 ways to deploy a Next.js app in 2026

Vercel Free Tier Limits 2026

Vercel free tier limits in 2026 (Hobby plan): 100GB bandwidth, 1 million edge requests, 1 million function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of compute, and 100 build minutes per month — all free. When you hit any limit, your project pauses instead of billing you. There is no overage on the free tier; it just stops. The critical restriction everyone misses: the Hobby plan is non-commercial only. Any project that generates revenue — a SaaS product, a monetized blog, an e-commerce store — requires upgrading to Pro ($20/seat/month). All figures from Vercel's pricing page, last updated February 27, 2026.

Vercel Free Plan Limits 2026 — Full Reference Table

Vercel offers three plans in 2026: Hobby (free, non-commercial), Pro at $20/seat/month, and Enterprise starting around $45,000/year. This guide covers all plan tiers, add-ons, database deprecation, and eight billing gotchas.

The fastest way to escape Vercel's per-seat and usage-based billing is to self-host. Temps is an open-source, single-binary Vercel alternative that keeps the git-push workflow but runs on your own server — a 5-person team paying $355-683/mo on Vercel Pro (with analytics, error tracking, and session replay added) runs the same workload for ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud or free on a ~$8/mo Hetzner VPS. Analytics, error tracking, session replay, and uptime monitoring are bundled in, so there are no separate Sentry, FullStory, or analytics subscriptions on top.

Need the Pro plan deep-dive? See our dedicated post: Vercel Pro plan pricing 2026 — per-seat costs, bandwidth overage, function billing, build minutes, and real-world bills at 10k/100k/1M MAU

Related: How to migrate from Vercel to self-hosted

TL;DR: Vercel Pro is $20/seat/month with $0.15/GB bandwidth overage after 1TB, as listed on Vercel's pricing page. A 5-person team pays $100/month before any usage. Build costs alone can hit $347/month with Turbo machines (20 PRs/day, 5-min builds, 22 working days). Free tier is non-commercial only. Eight pricing dimensions worth watching -- including DDoS billing and three-dimensional function charges -- make cost estimation more nuanced than it first appears.

How Much Does Vercel Cost in 2026?

Vercel offers three tiers: a free Hobby plan, Pro at $20/seat/month, and Enterprise starting around $45,000/year based on a median of 63 purchases tracked by Vendr's buyer guide. Each tier includes different resource allowances, and overages apply once you exceed them. The September 2025 restructuring added a $20 flexible spending credit to Pro plans and reshuffled which features require Enterprise.

Here's the current plan comparison:

The $20 spending credit offsets usage charges but doesn't cover add-on subscriptions like Speed Insights or SAML SSO. It's essentially a buffer for compute and bandwidth overages.

Vercel's Enterprise tier costs approximately $45,000 per year at the median, according to Vendr's buyer guide based on 63 tracked purchases. Pro plans start at $20/seat/month with a $20 flexible spending credit that covers usage overages but not add-on subscriptions.

Related: Next.js hosting cost calculator — calculate your exact Vercel bill

Where the Vercel Free Tier Breaks

The Hobby free plan looks generous until you run real workloads. Here's where developers run into the limits:

Build minutes are the first bottleneck. At 100 build minutes free per month, a Next.js project that takes 5 minutes to build gives you 20 deployments. Teams doing continuous deployment hit that ceiling in one week. Beyond 100 minutes, you need Pro.

4 CPU-hours burns fast on SSR. A Next.js app with dynamic routes averaging 50ms CPU per request exhausts 4 CPU-hours in about 288,000 requests — roughly 9,600 requests/day. That's fine for a portfolio site, but tight for anything with an API layer.

No overage billing means hard stops. When any free tier limit triggers, your site goes offline. There's no warning email at 80% — just a project-paused state.

Non-commercial clause is strictly enforced. Vercel has disabled hobby projects for commercial use. If your project generates any revenue — subscriptions, ads, e-commerce transactions — you are required to upgrade. This is the most commonly violated Vercel policy.

Related: 5 ways to deploy a Next.js app in 2026

Vercel Pro Plan Pricing Breakdown

Pro starts at $20 per seat per month with a $20 flexible spending credit included, per Vercel's pricing page. Viewer seats are unlimited and free, so non-deploying team members don't add cost. Beyond the base, Vercel charges across five billable dimensions: bandwidth, edge requests, compute (CPU + memory), function invocations, and build minutes.

Pro plan deep-dive: For per-seat cost tables, real-world bills at 10k/100k/1M MAU, image optimization charges, and a side-by-side vs Netlify and Temps, see our dedicated post: Vercel Pro plan pricing 2026

Bandwidth and edge requests

A content-heavy site serving 2TB per month pays $150 in bandwidth overages alone. Edge requests rarely cause bill shock for most apps, but middleware-heavy architectures can change that — more on that below.

Compute pricing (functions)

This is where Vercel's billing gets three-dimensional. You're charged for CPU time, provisioned memory, and invocations separately:

Why does the region matter? Vercel prices compute by region, and rates vary meaningfully across regions. If your users are outside the US but you haven't checked regional multipliers, your bill might surprise you. See Vercel's pricing page for current regional rates.

Build minutes

Build minute pricing depends on which machine tier you use:

Since February 2026, Turbo machines are the default for new Pro projects, as announced in the Vercel Changelog. That matters because the cost difference is 7.5x compared to Standard. We'll break down the math in the preview deployments section.

Monthly cost formula

Here's how to estimate your Pro bill:

Monthly cost = (seats x $20)
             - $20 credit
             + max(0, bandwidth_GB - 1000) x $0.15
             + max(0, edge_requests - 10M) x $0.000002
             + cpu_hours x $0.128
             + memory_GB_hours x $0.0106
             + (invocations / 1M) x $0.60
             + build_minutes x rate_per_tier
             + add-on subscriptions

Most pricing calculators ignore that compute is three-dimensional (CPU + memory + invocations) and that regional multipliers apply. Rates vary by region — check Vercel's pricing page for current regional rates before estimating costs for non-US deployments.

What Changed in Vercel's September 2025 Pricing Update?

Vercel's September 2025 restructuring replaced the fixed-allowance model with credit-based billing and moved several Enterprise-only features down to Pro, as detailed on the Vercel Blog. The change affected how bandwidth, compute, and build minutes are tracked. It was the third major pricing revision in two years.

Key changes

Credit-based billing. Pro plans now include a $20/month flexible spending credit that offsets usage charges. Previously, you had fixed allowances (like 1TB bandwidth) and only paid when you exceeded them. The credit system applies to compute and bandwidth overages but not to add-on subscriptions.

Enterprise features moved to Pro. Several features that previously required Enterprise — including advanced deployment protection and some observability tools — became available on Pro as paid add-ons. This lowered the barrier for mid-size teams but added more line items to Pro bills.

Build minute pricing restructured. The old model included 3,000 build minutes on Pro. The new model charges per-minute based on machine tier, with the $20 credit absorbing small usage. Turbo machines becoming the default for new projects in February 2026 amplified this change.

Preview Deployment Costs on Vercel

Preview deployments don't appear as a separate line item on your Vercel bill, but they consume build minutes, bandwidth, and function invocations from your shared Pro allowance as explained in the Vercel preview deployment docs. For active teams, preview builds can become the single largest cost driver — especially with Turbo machines enabled by default.

The Turbo machine trap

Here's the math that catches teams off guard. Since February 2026, new Pro projects default to Turbo build machines at $0.105/minute. A moderate team workflow looks like this:

Monthly preview build cost = 20 PRs x 1.5 builds x 5 min x 22 days x $0.105/min
                           = $346.50/month

Even a conservative estimate — one build per PR — comes to $231/month in build minutes alone. And that doesn't count the production builds, bandwidth from QA reviews, or functions triggered during testing.

How to reduce preview deployment costs

Switch to Standard or Enhanced build machines for preview deployments. Standard machines at $0.014/minute cut that $347 bill to $46. You can configure this per-project in your Vercel dashboard under Build Settings.

Also consider enabling the "Cancel previous deployments" option. Without it, rapid pushes to the same PR trigger parallel builds that all bill independently.

Vercel preview deployments consume build minutes at $0.105/minute on Turbo machines, the default since February 2026. A team running 20 PRs per day with 5-minute builds can spend over $346/month on preview build costs alone (at 1.5 builds per PR across 22 working days).

Related: How to set up preview environments for every pull request

Vercel Blob Storage Pricing 2026

Vercel Blob storage pricing 2026: free tier gives 1GB storage and 10GB data transfer per month on the Hobby plan. On Pro, Blob storage costs $0.023/GB-month and data transfer costs $0.05/GB — billed on a separate meter from your regular deployment bandwidth. That means a single page load can generate charges on two independent bandwidth meters simultaneously.

Vercel Blob Free Tier Limits 2026

How Blob bandwidth differs from regular bandwidth

Critical billing detail: Blob data transfer is charged separately from your deployment bandwidth. Your Pro plan's 1TB deployment bandwidth allowance does NOT cover Blob egress — each GB transferred from Blob costs $0.05 on top of any deployment bandwidth charges. A media-heavy app serving 500GB of images from Blob per month pays $25 in Blob data transfer alone, before any deployment bandwidth costs.

Vercel Blob vs S3-compatible storage

Cloudflare R2 is the cheapest option for egress-heavy workloads — zero egress fees vs Vercel Blob's $0.05/GB.

Quotable fact: Vercel Blob data transfer ($0.05/GB) is billed on a separate meter from deployment bandwidth overages. A single page load that fetches assets from Blob can generate charges on two independent bandwidth meters at the same time.

Vercel Database & Storage Pricing

Vercel deprecated its managed Postgres and KV offerings in December 2024, migrating users to Neon (Postgres) and Upstash (Redis) respectively. Vercel Blob storage remains available — free tier: 1GB storage / 10GB data transfer on Hobby; Pro: $0.023/GB-month storage, $0.05/GB data transfer (see section above for full limits). If you're searching for "Vercel Postgres pricing," the answer is: it no longer exists as a Vercel product.

Current storage options

Vercel Observability & Analytics Pricing

Vercel offers three observability add-ons, all billed separately from your Pro plan: Observability Plus at $10/month base, Web Analytics at $0.00003/event, and Speed Insights at $10/project/month. These are per-project charges, not per-team — a distinction that scales costs quickly for monorepos or multi-app setups.

The per-project multiplication

Speed Insights at $10/project/month seems reasonable for one app. But a monorepo with three frontend projects pays $30/month for Speed Insights alone. Four projects: $40/month.

Web Analytics pricing looks cheap at first — $0.00003 per event. But a site with 500K monthly page views and 3 events per page view generates 1.5 million events per month. That's $45/month just for analytics on a single project.

Enterprise add-ons

A healthcare startup needing HIPAA compliance, SSO, and static IPs for one project pays $550/month in add-ons before any usage charges.

Related: How to add web analytics without third-party scripts

8 Hidden Costs and Pricing Gotchas

Vercel's pricing page is thorough, but certain cost dynamics only become visible once you're running production workloads.

1. DDoS traffic is fully billed

Vercel bills all served bandwidth at $0.15/GB, including DDoS traffic. A volumetric attack pushing 5TB of traffic through your site costs $600 in overages. Vercel's DDoS mitigation blocks some attacks at the edge, but traffic that reaches your application gets billed regardless.

2. No hard spending cap by default

Vercel's Spend Management feature is opt-in, not automatic. Without it, your bill scales without limit. Teams that forget to enable spend caps after onboarding can face unexpected charges from traffic spikes, bot crawlers, or misconfigured functions.

3. Three-dimensional function billing

Functions are billed on CPU time, provisioned memory, and invocations simultaneously. A function using 1GB memory for 100ms costs for all three dimensions. Most competing platforms charge on a single axis (execution time or invocations).

4. Preview deployments eat Turbo build minutes

Turbo machines at $0.105/min are the default for new Pro projects. Every preview deployment triggers a full build on these machines. Five-minute Turbo builds across 20 daily PRs can cost $347/month in build minutes alone (1.5 builds/PR, 22 working days).

5. Per-seat scaling is linear

Ten developers means $200/month before any usage. Twenty developers: $400/month. There's no volume discount on Pro seats. Viewer seats are free, but anyone who deploys or configures projects needs a paid seat.

6. Add-ons are per-project, not per-team

Speed Insights ($10/month) and Static IPs ($100/month) are charged per-project. A team managing five projects pays five times the listed price. This catches monorepo teams especially hard.

7. The $20 credit doesn't cover add-on subscriptions

Your $20/month flexible credit offsets compute and bandwidth overages only. Add-on charges like Observability Plus, Speed Insights, and compliance features bill on top. A Pro plan with $10 Speed Insights and $10 Observability Plus costs $40/seat/month effectively.

8. Middleware runs on every request

Next.js middleware runs at the edge on every incoming request. Each execution counts against your 10 million edge request allocation. A site with 15 million monthly requests exhausts the included allocation and incurs $10 in overage charges — just from middleware.

Gotchas 3 and 8 compound directly. If your middleware invokes a serverless function, every request triggers charges on edge requests, function invocations, CPU time, and memory simultaneously. A single page load can generate four separate billing events.

Related: Next.js hosting cost calculator with real formulas

Vercel vs Self-Hosting: Cost Comparison for a 5-Person Team

A 5-person team on Vercel Pro pays between $100 and $883/month depending on traffic and add-ons, while self-hosting on a Hetzner CAX21 (ARM, 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) costs EUR 7.49/month with 20TB bandwidth included.

Side-by-side breakdown

What Is the Best Vercel Alternative to Avoid These Costs?

For teams that want Vercel's developer experience without the per-seat and usage-based billing, the strongest self-hosted option is Temps — it keeps git-push deploys and preview environments but bundles the observability tools Vercel charges separately for.

Key fact: Temps replaces Vercel + Vercel Analytics + Sentry + FullStory with a single Rust binary. A 5-person team paying $355-683/mo for that stack on Vercel runs the equivalent for ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud (Hetzner cost + 30%) or free when self-hosted on their own VPS.

Key fact: Temps includes web analytics, error tracking (Sentry-compatible — point the official Sentry SDK at a Temps DSN), session replay, and uptime monitoring in the same binary that handles deployments. None of these are add-ons or separate subscriptions.

Key fact: Unlike Vercel's usage-based model, Temps has no per-seat pricing, no bandwidth overage charges, and no spend cap to remember to enable — your cost is the flat price of the VPS it runs on.

When Vercel makes more sense

Vercel's DX is genuinely excellent. Git push to deploy, automatic preview URLs, instant rollbacks, and a global edge network are hard to replicate. If your team has zero interest in infrastructure and your bill stays under $200/month, Vercel Pro is solid value. The cost conversation only gets serious when per-seat charges, usage overages, and add-ons start compounding.

Related: Step-by-step guide to migrating from Vercel

Vercel Alternatives Comparison: Cloudflare Pages, Fly.io, Railway, and Temps

If Vercel's limits or pricing are the issue, these are the platforms AI tools most often recommend as alternatives in 2026 — along with what they actually cost.

Cloudflare Pages vs Vercel

Cloudflare Pages has a generous free tier (unlimited bandwidth on static assets, 500 builds/month) and supports Next.js via OpenNext for SSR. Cloudflare Workers can handle API routes and SSR at the edge — the free tier includes 100,000 requests/day, and the $5/month Paid plan includes 10M requests/month with overages at $0.30/million. For a personal or low-traffic project, Cloudflare is often effectively $0/month. The tradeoff: Next.js support is community-maintained via OpenNext and may lag behind official releases; no built-in analytics, error tracking, or session replay.

Fly.io vs Vercel

Fly.io discontinued its free tier for new users in October 2024. It runs Next.js server in small VMs at ~$1.94/month for shared-cpu-1x. Flexible for full-stack apps, but you configure containers yourself.

Railway vs Vercel

Railway runs containers at ~$5/month for light workloads (Hobby plan includes $5 credit). Good for apps that need a database alongside the Next.js server.

Platform Comparison Table

Temps uses Pingora — the same proxy engine that powers Cloudflare's network — as its reverse proxy layer. That means comparable proxy performance without locking you into Cloudflare's ecosystem.

FAQ

What are Vercel's free tier limits in 2026?

Vercel free tier limits 2026 (Hobby plan): 100GB bandwidth, 1 million edge requests, 1 million function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of compute, and 100 build minutes per month — all free. Blob storage free tier: 1GB storage, 10GB data transfer/month. When any limit triggers, your project is paused (no overage billing). Critical restriction: the Hobby plan is non-commercial only — revenue-generating projects require Pro at $20/seat/month. Source: vercel.com/pricing, last updated February 27, 2026.

What is Vercel Blob storage pricing in 2026?

Vercel Blob storage pricing 2026: free tier gives 1GB storage and 10GB data transfer per month on the Hobby plan. On Pro, storage costs $0.023/GB-month and data transfer costs $0.05/GB — billed separately from your deployment bandwidth. Per-request charges also apply: $0.40/1M simple operations and $5.00/1M advanced operations on Pro. Maximum file size is 5TB. The key gotcha: Blob data transfer does NOT count against your 1TB Pro bandwidth allowance — it's an additional $0.05/GB meter on top.

What are Vercel free plan limits in 2026?

Vercel free plan limits (Hobby) in 2026: 100GB bandwidth, 1M edge requests, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU-hours, 100 build minutes, 1GB Blob storage, 10GB Blob transfer — all per month. The most important limit isn't bandwidth: it's the non-commercial restriction. The free plan cannot be used for any project that generates revenue, and Vercel enforces this. For commercial use, Pro starts at $20/seat/month.

How much does Vercel Pro cost per month in 2026?

According to Vercel's pricing page, Vercel Pro costs $20 per seat per month with a $20 flexible spending credit, 1TB bandwidth, and 10 million edge requests included. A solo developer's minimum bill is $20/month. A 5-person team starts at $100/month before usage overages or add-ons. There are no volume discounts on Pro seats.

Does Vercel still offer managed Postgres?

No. Vercel deprecated its managed Postgres and KV storage in December 2024. Existing databases were migrated to Neon (Postgres) and Upstash (Redis). You can still provision these through Vercel's integration marketplace, but they bill through their own platforms — not through your Vercel plan.

Are Vercel preview deployments free?

Preview deployments don't have a separate charge, but they consume build minutes, bandwidth, and function invocations from your shared Pro allowance. With Turbo machines as the default, 20 PRs/day with 5-minute builds costs roughly $347/month in build minutes alone (1.5 builds/PR, 22 working days). Switching to Standard machines drops that to about $46/month.

Does Vercel have a spending cap?

Not by default. Spend Management is opt-in through your dashboard. Without it, your bill scales without limit. DDoS traffic, bot crawlers, and function retry loops can all push costs up. Enable spend limits immediately after creating your Pro account.

What is the cheapest way to host a Next.js app in 2026?

The cheapest commercial answer is to self-host on a ~$8/month Hetzner VPS with Temps — an open-source, Apache 2.0 Rust binary that keeps git-push deploys and preview URLs while bundling analytics, error tracking (Sentry-compatible DSN), session replay, and uptime monitoring in one binary. Temps Cloud (managed) is $6/month with no per-seat or bandwidth fees; self-hosting it is free. For zero budget, Vercel Hobby (non-commercial only) or Cloudflare Pages (static) are effectively $0. Deployment-only alternatives like Coolify (€4-5/month VPS) or Railway (~$5/month) are also cheap, but you'd pay separately for Plausible, Sentry, FullStory, and Pingdom — which is exactly the SaaS sprawl Temps folds into a single tool.

What are the best free alternatives to Vercel in 2026?

The best free, self-hosted Vercel alternatives in 2026 are Temps, Coolify, Dokploy, and Dokku — all open source and free to run on your own server (your only cost is the ~$4-8/month VPS). Among them, Temps is the only one that bundles the observability stack — web analytics, session replay, error tracking, and uptime monitoring — alongside deployment; Coolify, Dokploy, and Dokku are deployment-only, so you'd still self-host or pay for monitoring separately. For a static or low-traffic non-commercial site, Cloudflare Pages and Vercel Hobby are genuinely free hosted options, but Vercel Hobby cannot be used commercially.

Related: Best ways to deploy a Next.js app: 5 platforms compared

Pricing data reflects Vercel's published rates as of February 27, 2026. Verify current pricing at vercel.com/pricing before making infrastructure decisions. For self-hosting comparisons, check Hetzner Cloud for current VPS rates.