Hosting and deploy
How much does Vercel cost, and what does the free plan include?
Vercel plans checked in November 2026: what the free Hobby plan includes and forbids, what Pro costs, how usage billing works, and how to avoid surprise bills.
Vercel's Hobby plan is free for personal, non-commercial projects, with capped usage such as 100 GB of fast data transfer and 1 million function invocations a month. Commercial sites need Pro, which starts at 20 dollars a month and includes 20 dollars of usage credit, with further usage billed as you go. Enterprise is priced individually.
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The plans
Vercel's pricing page on 9 November 2026:
- Hobby: free, for personal and non-commercial use. Usage is capped and cannot be extended by paying.
- Pro: 20 dollars a month, for professionals, freelancers and businesses, with 20 dollars of included usage credit each month and pay-as-you-go beyond it.
- Enterprise: custom pricing and terms.
What Hobby includes
- 100 GB of fast data transfer a month.
- 1 million function invocations and 1 million edge requests a month.
- Deploy previews, custom domains and automatic HTTPS. The key restriction is commercial use. A company website, a SaaS or a client project belongs on Pro under Vercel's terms.
How Pro billing works
Pro includes a monthly usage credit that can be spent across resources such as data transfer, function execution and image optimization. Beyond it, usage is billed, and it is not capped by default. Set spend management limits in the dashboard so unexpected traffic or a loop in a function cannot run up an unlimited bill.
A function that calls an AI API on every request, without caching or rate limits, is the usual source of surprise Vercel and AI bills at the same time.
Keeping costs down
- Cache pages and data that are the same for everyone, instead of rendering them on every request.
- Optimise images and serve them in modern formats at the right size.
- Keep static assets static, with long cache headers.
- Watch the usage dashboard by project and resource after launch.
- Rate limit API routes that call paid services.
Alternatives
Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and Render offer comparable free tiers with different limits and commercial rules. For long-running servers and databases, platforms such as Railway or Render may be simpler than serverless functions.
What a scan can and cannot tell you
WebAuditOS checks things that drive delivery costs from outside: cache headers, server response time and page weight. Good caching reduces both bandwidth and function invocations.
It cannot see your Vercel plan, usage or bill.
Missing cache headers do not prove a function runs for every visit: static delivery, platform defaults and route behavior also matter. Review the hosting metrics before attributing costs.
Short answers
Is Vercel free? Hobby is free for personal, non-commercial projects.
Can I use Hobby for a business? Not under Vercel's terms. Business use needs Pro.
How much is Vercel Pro? From 20 dollars a month, with 20 dollars of usage credit included.
How do I avoid surprise bills? Set spend limits and cache what you can.
In the product
The checks this maps to
Every check named here runs on every scan, on every plan - what a plan changes is how many pages are crawled, how long the history is kept and what you can do with the result. These are the ids the findings carry, so you can match a line in a report to the explanation above.
- perf.cache-headers - Cache-Control configured
- perf.ttfb - Server responds quickly (TTFB)
- perf.page-weight - HTML document size reasonable
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