Vercel cost calculator
The PaaS Tax Calculator estimates a Vercel Pro bill from team seats, bandwidth, compute, databases, and storage, then compares it with the estimated cost of running the same workload on a Hetzner VPS with Temps.
What Is the PaaS Tax?
The "PaaS tax" is the markup you pay on top of raw infrastructure costs when using managed deployment platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or Railway. A Hetzner CX23 (2 vCPU / 4 GB, €5.49/month excluding VAT) can host a Next.js application. On Vercel Pro the same application pays for deploying seats ($20/month each), bandwidth overage (1 TB included, then a Flat Rate CDN tier — the default for Pro teams created since 8 September 2026, $20/month up to 50 TB — or, on on-demand pricing, from $0.15/GB — $150/TB — varying by region), serverless compute ($0.128/CPU-hour), and add-on services like Postgres, blob storage, and KV cache billed separately. Competitor prices checked October 7, 2026; see the Vercel pricing guide for the full plan breakdown.
This calculator makes that gap concrete for your own workload, so you can decide whether the operational convenience of a PaaS is worth the premium.
Worked Example: the Startup Preset
The Startup preset models two Next.js apps, a static site, a Node.js API and a background worker, with development, staging and production Postgres databases (20 GB), 50 GB of blob storage, 1 TB of bandwidth and five people who deploy. The calculator prices it at $166.63/month on Vercel Pro and $18.80/month on a Hetzner CX43 running Temps, about nine times less. Seats and always-on databases make up nearly all of the Vercel figure; the server is sized for the workload's estimated 6.3 GB of RAM and 7.2 vCPU.
Vercel Pro
- 5 deploying seats at $20
- $100.00
- 3 always-on Postgres databases (Neon Launch, 0.25 CU each) and 20 GB
- $65.05
- Blob storage, KV requests and analytics events over the included amounts
- $1.58
- 1 TB of bandwidth (the included amount on Flat Rate CDN and on-demand; CDN requests not modelled) and 500 GB-hours of functions
- Included
- Per month
- $166.63
Hetzner CX43 with Temps
- Hetzner CX43: 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 160 GB disk (€15.99 excluding VAT, plus €0.50 for an IPv4 address)
- $18.80
- 20 TB of bandwidth, the three databases, storage and analytics
- Included
- Temps (MIT / Apache 2.0), any number of users
- $0.00
- Per month
- $18.80
Vercel prices checked October 10, 2026, Neon prices October 7, 2026; Hetzner specs and prices checked October 10, 2026 (CX43 at €15.99/month excluding VAT plus €0.50 for an IPv4 address, converted at about 1.14 USD per EUR). The self-hosted column leaves out your time to run the server.
How to Use This Calculator
Simple mode — enter your team size, monthly bandwidth in GB, and serverless function GB-hours. The calculator immediately shows your estimated Vercel Pro bill and the equivalent self-hosted cost on a Hetzner VPS running Temps. Bandwidth is priced on Flat Rate CDN, the default for new Pro teams; switch to on-demand if your team was created before 8 September 2026 and hasn't moved over.
Advanced mode — model your full stack by selecting app types (Next.js SSR, SPA, Node.js API, background workers), database tiers (dev, staging, production), database storage, blob storage, KV request volume, and analytics event volume. The calculator recommends the smallest Hetzner server tier that fits your workload and shows a line-by-line cost breakdown for both options.
Use the preset buttons — Solo Dev, Startup, Scale-up, Enterprise — to jump to realistic configurations, then adjust sliders to match your actual usage. The Share button generates a URL with your exact configuration encoded so you can send it to a teammate or bookmark it.
What Self-Hosting Costs Include
The self-hosted estimate uses Hetzner Cloud prices converted to USD (a CX23 is €5.49/month excluding VAT, checked October 7, 2026; CX and CAX servers are sold in Germany and Finland). Every tier includes 20 TB of outbound bandwidth, which covers the vast majority of web applications. To size a server, see choosing a server. Temps — the self-hosted PaaS running on the VPS — provides git-push deployments, automatic HTTPS, preview environments, built-in PostgreSQL, Redis/KV storage, analytics, error tracking, and session replay at no additional cost per feature.
Team seats are unlimited on all Temps plans. There are no per-user fees, no function invocation charges, and no bandwidth billing within the included 20 TB. A single CX33 (4 vCPU / 8 GB) or CX43 (8 vCPU / 16 GB) covers stacks like the Startup preset above. For a second worked example, read the Next.js hosting cost breakdown or compare plans on Temps pricing and Temps vs Vercel.
Common Cost Surprises on Managed PaaS
- Per-seat fees accumulate faster than traffic costs. A 10-person engineering team deploying on Vercel Pro pays $200/month in seats before a single user visits the site.
- Bandwidth overage adds up. After the included 1 TB, Vercel charges from $0.15/GB on demand ($150 per extra TB, more in some regions); Flat Rate CDN, on by default for Pro teams created since 8 September 2026, swaps that for fixed capacity tiers ($20 to $300/month). Hetzner includes 20 TB and charges about $1/TB beyond that.
- Each database is billed separately. Vercel no longer sells Postgres; you add a Marketplace provider such as Neon. An always-on 0.25 CU Neon Launch database is about $19/month plus $0.35/GB-month, so dev + staging + prod adds roughly $58/month before storage.
- Analytics and error tracking are add-ons. Plausible starts at $9/month and Sentry Team at $26/month. Temps bundles analytics and error tracking into the base VPS cost.