On this page
A free hosting tier does not send you a surprise bill. It stops. On Vercel's Hobby plan, exceeding an included amount means waiting — in most cases until 30 days have passed — before the feature works again. And there is a line above all the usage numbers that matters more than any of them: Hobby is for non-commercial, personal use only.
Figures below are from Vercel's own plan documentation, checked 6 October 2026, because it is the host this site runs on and the one with the clearest published limits. The structure applies broadly; the specific numbers do not.
What does the free tier actually include?
| Resource | Hobby, per month |
|---|---|
| Fast data transfer | first 100 GB |
| Fast origin transfer | first 10 GB |
| CDN requests | first 1,000,000 |
| Function invocations | first 1,000,000 |
| Active CPU | 4 CPU-hours |
| Image transformations | first 5,000 |
| Web Analytics events | 50,000 |
| Deployments per day | 100 |
| Runtime log retention | 1 hour |
For a static site, those first four lines are not a constraint you will meet. This site is 150 pre-rendered pages, and a hundred gigabytes of transfer would be an extraordinary month.
The two that actually bite are at the bottom of the table, and neither is about traffic.
Why is one hour of logs the real limitation?
Because problems are reported later than they happen.
Someone submits a form on Tuesday evening, the email never arrives, and they tell you on Thursday — or more likely, they tell nobody. On a one-hour retention window the evidence of what the server did is long gone, and you are left reproducing the fault rather than reading what happened.
Paid plans extend this to a day. A day is not generous either, but it covers the gap between "something broke" and "someone mentioned it", which is the gap that matters.
If you are running anything with a form, a webhook or a payment in it, this limit is worth more than the bandwidth.
The whole list
67 tools, what each costs and when you actually need it. Updated twice a year.
What happens when you cross a line?
Nothing arrives in your inbox. The thing stops working.
| Plan type | Over the included amount |
|---|---|
| Free tier | the feature pauses, typically for 30 days |
| Paid plan | you are billed for the overage |
This is the opposite of what most people brace for. The fear is a four-figure bill from a traffic spike; the reality on a free tier is that your site goes quiet at exactly the moment something of yours is being shared.
Which of those two is worse depends entirely on what the site is for. For a hobby project, a pause is obviously right. For a shop on the day a video lands, a pause is the expensive option, and you cannot pay your way out of it retroactively.
When does a free plan stop being allowed?
The moment you sell something.
Vercel's documentation is explicit: under its fair use guidelines, the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only. There is no revenue threshold in that sentence. A site with a checkout on it is commercial whether it has made €4,000 or nothing at all.
This is the part people miss, because the usage numbers are so generous for a small site that nothing ever breaks and no warning is triggered. You can run a shop on a free plan for a long time without noticing you are not supposed to.
It is worth being deliberate about rather than discovering during a dispute. If you have a product page and a payment link, budget for the paid plan as part of selling, in the same line as the payment fees.
So when should you actually upgrade?
Three triggers, in the order they usually arrive:
- You put a checkout on it. This is the terms-of-service line, and it is binary.
- You need to see what happened yesterday. The hour of logs becomes the bottleneck well before the bandwidth does.
- You start serving media. Pages are small; video is not. A hundred gigabytes is thousands of page views or a few hundred video views, and the difference between those two is what you decided to host.
What is not a good trigger: a feature list. Most of what a paid tier adds is for teams, and you are not one.
What about the rest of the stack?
The same shape repeats. Database, email and analytics tiers all have a point where the free version stops rather than scales, and the useful question for each is the same two: what happens when I cross it, and am I allowed to be here commercially at all.
What AI tools actually cost per month puts the whole stack together with current prices, and what a domain actually costs over five years covers the one line that never has a free tier.
Where these numbers came from
Vercel's Hobby plan documentation, checked 6 October 2026, including its stated included usage, the 30-day pause behaviour, the 7-day resumption for Web Analytics, and the fair use guideline on commercial usage.
Included amounts on free tiers change often, usually upward, and are not worth memorising. The two things worth carrying: a free tier pauses rather than bills, and "free" usually has a clause about what you are allowed to use it for.
If you are building the thing that will eventually need this, The Vibe Coding Playbook is the one that covers getting it live.
Tools in this piece
| Tool | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting. Puts a project live on a real address with one command. | Free tier |
| Cloudflare | DNS, domains and basic protection. | Free |
| Supabase | Database, accounts and file storage in one, with no backend work. | Free tier |
| Stripe | Payments and subscriptions. The standard, and integrating it is a matter of asking. | Free, percentage per sale |
Every tool has its own page with the price, who should skip it and what to check before paying. Some links are affiliate links.
Questions people ask
What happens when you exceed a free hosting tier?
On Vercel's Hobby plan you are not billed for the overage — the feature stops, and in most cases you wait until 30 days have passed before you can use it again. Web Analytics collection pauses after a grace period and can resume after 7 days.
Can you use a free hosting plan for a commercial site?
Not on Vercel. The documentation states that the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only, under its fair use guidelines. A site that sells something is commercial regardless of how little it earns.
What is included on Vercel's Hobby plan?
Checked 6 October 2026: the first 100 GB of fast data transfer, 10 GB of fast origin transfer, 1,000,000 CDN requests, 1,000,000 function invocations, 4 CPU-hours, 50,000 Web Analytics events, 100 deployments per day and one hour of runtime logs.
How much traffic is 100 GB a month?
For a text-and-HTML site, far more than a new project will ever use. For a site serving video or large images directly, it is a few thousand views. The number only becomes real once you host media rather than pages.
Why does one hour of runtime logs matter?
Because when something breaks you usually find out later than that. On the free tier the evidence is gone before you go looking, which is the single most annoying limitation for anyone debugging a form or a webhook.