The free Hobby plan is for personal projects, so a product that earns needs Pro. Vercel is a frontend hosting and serverless platform best known for Next.js. The Hobby plan costs $0 a month and, per the pricing table, includes 1M CDN requests, 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1M function invocations, 4 hours of Fluid Active CPU and 1 developer seat each month, with automatic CI/CD, a global CDN, a web application firewall (up to 3 custom rules) and DDoS mitigation. The FAQ says Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use, and that Hobby accounts are held to usage caps and cannot buy extra usage. Pro is $20 a month with $20 of included usage credit, and each developer seat is $20 a month. G2 shows 4.6 from 88 reviews, with 81% five-star. Complaints on r/nextjs focus on the non-commercial rule and on bills that grew once projects scaled.
Free tier quotas
Price
$0 a month on Hobby
Allowed use
Personal, non-commercial use only, per the pricing FAQ
CDN requests
1M a month
Fast Data Transfer
100 GB a month
Function invocations
1M a month, plus 4 hours of Fluid Active CPU and 360 GB-hrs of provisioned memory
Hobby accounts are limited to the usage caps and cannot buy additional usage
Last sniffed Oct 13, 2026. Always confirm on the official pricing page.
👍 Good boy
+Hobby is $0 and includes 1M CDN requests, 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and 1M function invocations a month, enough for a portfolio or a small app.
+Automatic CI/CD, a global CDN, a web application firewall, DDoS mitigation and Fluid compute are on the Hobby plan, per the pricing page.
+G2 shows 4.6 from 88 reviews with 81% five-star. Reviewers cite automatic deployments, Git integration and preview environments.
+Hobby accounts are held to usage caps and cannot buy additional usage, per the FAQ, so a free account is not set up to run up a bill.
+On Pro, spend management sets a default on-demand budget of $200 for new teams with alerts, and you can configure an automatic pause at 100%.
+A r/nextjs commenter said Hobby is completely fine for a low-traffic personal site, because that amount of traffic is basically nothing.
👎 Watch out
−Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use, and several r/nextjs threads say that hosting a commercial project on it breaks the terms. A startup or client site needs Pro at $20 a month.
−Pro adds seat costs. The pricing table shows a developer seat at $20 a month, so a three-person team pays more than the headline $20.
−Bills can jump at scale. A r/nextjs poster said a front-end-only app went from under $100 to over $800 in a month, and an older thread reported $237 after exceeding Hobby limits.
−Hobby has tight observability and security limits: 1 hour of runtime logs, 3 custom firewall rules, 50K Web Analytics events and no way to buy extra usage.
−A r/nextjs commenter said Pro at $20 a month got them to about 20M page loads a month of dynamic pages before they hit limits, so the headline price says little about what heavy dynamic traffic costs.
−I did not find the current behavior when a Hobby project hits a cap, so test it before relying on a free project for anything important.
The catch
Hobby is non-commercial. The pricing FAQ says it is for personal, non-commercial use and that commercial usage needs Pro or Enterprise, and Reddit threads repeat that hosting a business or client site on it is against the terms. If your project earns money, plan for $20 a month plus $20 per developer seat.
Hobby caps are firm. Hobby accounts are limited to the usage caps and cannot buy additional usage. I did not find what happens at the cap, so check Vercel's limits page.
Bills on paid plans can rise with traffic and dynamic rendering. Reddit posters report jumps from under $100 to over $800 a month on one front-end app, and the pricing page offers spend management and a flat-rate CDN on Pro to limit that. Whether signup needs a card is unknown.
What’s included
✓Git-based automatic CI/CD
✓Global CDN
✓Fluid compute for functions
✓Web application firewall and DDoS mitigation
✓Preview deployments
✓Incremental Static Regeneration
✓Image optimization
✓Blob storage
✓Web Analytics and Speed Insights
Free tier value
Generosity
B
Estimated value
Free hosting for personal projects with 100 GB of transfer and 1M requests a month
Feature parity
Pro ($20 a month) adds $20 of usage credit, spend management and team collaboration.
Screenshots
HomepagePricing page
Paid plans
Pro, $20 a month
All Hobby features plus $20 of included usage credit, flat-rate CDN with traffic spike protection, advanced spend management, team collaboration with free viewer seats, cold start prevention and a free custom domain. Developer seats are $20 a month.
Usage beyond the credit
Pay as you go on Pro, uncapped, for example $0.60 per 1M function invocations beyond the included amount and basic build minutes at $0.007 per minute.
Enterprise, custom
Adds guest and team access controls, SCIM and Directory Sync, managed WAF rulesets, multi-region compute and failover, a 99.99% SLA and advanced support.
Common questions
Can I use Vercel Hobby for a commercial project?
No. The pricing FAQ says Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use. Commercial usage requires Pro or Enterprise.
What happens when I exceed Hobby limits?
The FAQ says Hobby accounts are limited to the usage caps and cannot purchase additional usage. Upgrade to Pro to pay for more.
How much does Pro cost?
$20 a month with $20 of included usage credit. Developer seats are $20 a month.
How do I control spend on Pro?
New teams get a default on-demand budget of $200 with alerts, and you can configure Vercel to pause all projects at 100%.
How is Vercel rated?
G2 shows 4.6 from 88 reviews, 81% of them five-star.
Change history
Checked October 22, 2026
Pricing page and FAQ read in full. G2 rating from search excerpts. Reddit threads read as excerpts; one pricing complaint is older and refers to a previous compute model. Card requirement unknown.
