What does Vercel actually cost on Hobby vs Pro?

The core plans: Hobby ($0) vs Pro ($20/month)

Vercel Hobby is completely free, but the fair use guidelines restrict you to personal, non-commercial use only. If you put a stripe checkout on the site, show client work, or run a company landing page, you are violating the terms.

Pro costs $20 a month for the platform fee. That covers a single deploying team seat (Owner or Member role) along with unlimited free Viewer seats for stakeholders who only need read-only access. If another engineer needs to trigger deployments or manage infrastructure, you will pay an additional $20 per month for each paid seat.

Monthly Base = $20 + ($20 x additional deploying seats)

There is a 14-day free trial for Pro that comes with $20 in credits so you can test team workflows without committing immediately. Paid Pro teams also get one free first-year custom domain across 16 eligible TLDs, including .agency, .app, .co, .company, .dev, .digital, .info, .live, .online, .pro, .site, .space, .store, .studio, .tech, and .website. This domain promotion does not apply during the 14-day trial; you become eligible only after your team switches to a paid Pro billing cycle, and the domain renews at regular pricing after the first year.

Scale limits jump significantly between tiers. Hobby caps you at 200 projects, 50 domains per project, and 100 deployments per day. Pro removes the project and domain ceilings entirely and raises deployments to 6,000 per day.

How the $20 monthly credit and Flat Rate CDN work

Every paid Pro subscription includes a $20 monthly credit. The credit applies automatically from the very first unit of managed infrastructure you burn, and once you spend past that initial $20, Vercel bills all extra resources on-demand. Unused credit expires at the end of the month without rolling over, and resets fresh on your next cycle.

Pro also bundles the lowest capacity tier of Flat Rate CDN at no extra charge. This gives you 1 million CDN requests and 1 TB of data transfer each month.

Under Flat Rate CDN, key bandwidth items - Fast Data Transfer, CDN Requests, Blob Data Transfer, and Sandbox Data Transfer - are pooled into the flat tier rather than billed directly as individual line items. This protects your account from immediate overage bills when a post trends or a crawler hits your assets.

Main resource rates when you scale or go over

When your usage pushes past the included limits on Pro, on-demand billing begins.

Serverless Functions

Serverless execution is measured in three dimensions: active CPU, provisioned memory, and raw invocations.

• Fluid Active CPU: Hobby gives you 4 hours a month; Pro charges on-demand rates starting at $0.128 per hour, depending on the region.
• Fluid Provisioned Memory: Hobby includes 360 GB-hrs; Pro bills starting at $0.0106 per GB-hr.
• Function Invocations: Hobby includes 1 million; Pro charges starting at $0.60 per 1 million.
• Execution duration: Hobby functions time out after 300 seconds (5 minutes). Pro defaults to 300 seconds, but you can configure them up to 800 seconds in project settings, or up to 1800 seconds (30 minutes) under the current beta.

If a function response is cached at the edge, it does not execute. It skips the invocation count and runs zero GB-hours of duration, though the hit still counts as a standard CDN request.

Data transfer and origin fetch

Hobby includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and 1 million CDN requests. Beyond those numbers on unpaid setups, the platform rate is $0.15 per 1 GB and $2.00 per 1 million requests, though Pro accounts have these covered by Flat Rate CDN. Fast Origin Transfer gives Hobby users 10 GB; Pro bills this directly starting at $0.06 per 1 GB. For edge logic, Pro includes 1 hour of CDN Request CPU Duration, with extra usage priced at $0.30 per hour.

Image Optimization, Cache, and Storage

Image transformations eat budget quickly if you render varied sizes dynamically. Hobby includes 5,000 transformations, 300,000 cache reads, and 100,000 cache writes per month. Pro on-demand rates run:

• Transformations: $0.05 to $0.0812 per 1,000.
• Cache reads: $0.40 to $0.64 per 1 million.
• Cache writes: $4.00 to $6.40 per 1 million.

Runtime Cache (ISR) works similarly, measuring reads and writes in 8 KB units. Hobby grants 1 million read units and 200,000 write units shared across all projects in the account. Pro charges $0.40 to $0.64 per 1 million read units and $4.00 to $6.40 per 1 million write units.

For Vercel Blob, Hobby includes 1 GB of storage, 10,000 Simple Operations, 2,000 Advanced Operations, and 10 GB of transfer. Pro bills storage at $0.023 per GB, Simple Operations at $0.400 per 1 million, and Advanced Operations at $5.000 per 1 million, with data transfer covered under Flat Rate CDN or priced at $0.050 per GB.

Global Config gives Hobby 100,000 reads and 100 writes per month. Extra usage costs $3 per 1 million reads and $1 per 100 writes.

Build machines and analytics

Basic build machines (2 vCPUs) are completely free on Hobby. On paid teams, Basic machines cost $0.007 per build minute. Build usage across the platform runs at $0.0035 per CPU minute, with durations rounded up to the nearest full minute and multiplied by the CPU count: Standard machines (4 vCPUs) cost $0.014 per minute, Enhanced (8 vCPUs) cost $0.028 per minute, and Turbo (30 vCPUs) cost $0.105 per minute. Standard builds are only charged if you turn on on-demand concurrency or select Elastic build machines.

For analytics, Hobby gives you 50,000 Web Analytics events per month with a 1-month reporting window. Pro does not include free analytics events; it charges $0.03 per 1,000 events ($3 per 100,000) and stores data across a 12-month window. Speed Insights includes 10,000 free events over a rolling 30-day window across the whole team on both tiers, but Pro users can add Speed Insights Plus for $10 per month per project plus $0.65 per 10,000 events.

What happens when you hit your limits?

On the Hobby tier, you cannot purchase extra capacity. If you max out a resource, there is no automatic upgrade and no surprise invoice; your project simply stops functioning for that feature. Because Hobby does not run on monthly billing dates, you typically have to wait 30 days for the limit to clear. If your Web Analytics exceed their volume, tracking pauses after a brief grace period and can resume after 7 days. If you exhaust the shared 8 KB units for ISR, your runtime cache pauses for the rest of the period.

On Pro, reaching 75% of your $20 credit triggers an automated notification. Once you blow through the remaining credit, Vercel switches the team directly to on-demand billing and begins sending daily and weekly usage summary emails.

New teams get a default spend management budget of $200 per billing cycle. The dashboard delivers notifications via email, web, and SMS as you reach that threshold. You can also configure an optional hard limit that automatically pauses all projects once spending reaches 100% of the target. For deeper background on configuring these controls, read How do I set a spending limit on Vercel?.

Optional Pro add-ons can be enabled directly under Settings > Billing in the dashboard:

• Password Protection: $20/month per project
• Observability Plus (extends log retention from 1 day to 30 days): $1.20 per 1 million events
• Web Analytics Plus: $10/month
• Static IPs: $100/month per project, plus Private Data Transfer
• Preview Deployment Suffix: $100/month
• Flags Explorer: $250/month
• SAML Single Sign-On: $300/month
• HIPAA BAA agreements: $350/month

If you ever decide to downgrade back to Hobby via Settings > Billing > Downgrade Plan, note that Vercel strips all team members except the primary owner immediately. You must also manually transfer any connected Stores and Domains away from the team prior to downgrading, or the platform will block the request. If you are already troubleshooting an unexpected spike on your bill, see Why is my Vercel bill so high, and what usually causes it?.

Tracking spend and preventing overages with Costbrake

If you are balancing Vercel alongside other cloud or model providers, managing individual thresholds in every console gets tedious. Costbrake monitors overall billing across 23 platforms - including Vercel, AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Supabase - so you see your burn in one place.

Costbrake tracks on-demand spend and alerts you on spikes (any hour costing 3x your 7-day average and at least $5 higher), budget thresholds (50%, 80%, and 100%), and 72-hour month-end forecasts.

For Vercel specifically, Costbrake reads team spend via a scoped token. When traffic surges get out of hand, an admin can click to trigger two manual, reversible brakes:

1. Turn on Attack Challenge Mode: forces incoming visitors through a browser verification screen, filtering out scraper traffic and automated abuse while letting cron jobs and verified webhooks through.
2. Pause Project: temporarily takes the production deployment offline by returning a 503 DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED response and stopping functions, while leaving preview branches and configuration untouched.

You can wire this up manually or have your AI tool handle it via agent setup. There is a free plan, and paid tiers start at $12 a month on Costbrake pricing.