Vercel Free Plan Limits in 2026: Hobby Allowances and Rules
Vercel free plan limits explained: Hobby bandwidth, requests and function allowances, the non-commercial rule, and what happens if you go over.
6 min read
Vercel's free Hobby plan includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1 million CDN requests and 1 million function invocations a month, with free preview deployments and HTTPS. The catch is the licence: Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. There are no paid overages, so if you exceed an allowance you generally wait 30 days or upgrade to Pro.
Below is the full table of Hobby allowances, the exact wording of the commercial rule, what happens at the limit and how to tell when it's time to pay. For other options, see our roundup of free web hosting for static pages.
Limits checked 14 October 2026 against each provider's official docs. Free plans change often; check the linked pages before you commit.
What does the Vercel Hobby plan include?
These figures come from Vercel's Hobby plan docs, its pricing page and its limits page.
Monthly usage allowances
| Resource | Hobby allowance (per month) |
|---|---|
| Fast Data Transfer | 100 GB |
| Fast Origin Transfer | 10 GB |
| CDN requests | 1,000,000 |
| Function invocations | 1,000,000 |
| Active CPU | 4 CPU-hours |
| Provisioned memory | 360 GB-hours |
| Image transformations | 5,000 |
| Web Analytics events | 50,000 |
Platform limits
| Limit | Hobby |
|---|---|
| Deployments | 100 per day |
| Concurrent builds | 1 |
| Maximum build time | 45 minutes |
| Projects | 200 |
| Static file upload via CLI | 100 MB |
| Function max duration | 300 seconds |
| Cron jobs | 100 per project |
| Domains | 50 per project |
| Developer seats | 1 |
Preview deployments are included, so every branch or pull request can get its own URL. Serving static files isn't counted as a build, and custom domains get free HTTPS certificates.
What does the Vercel bandwidth limit mean for a static site?
Vercel splits transfer into two meters. Fast Data Transfer (100 GB) is data sent from Vercel's CDN to visitors. Fast Origin Transfer (10 GB) is data moving between the CDN and Vercel's compute, such as function responses or cache misses.
For a purely static site, almost everything is served from the CDN, so Fast Data Transfer is the number to watch. 100 GB a month is plenty for a portfolio, blog or documentation site with optimised images. Sites that lean heavily on functions or uncached server rendering will feel the 10 GB origin allowance sooner.
The 1 million CDN requests also matter. A page with 30 assets makes about 30 requests per uncached visit, so very asset-heavy pages hit the request cap before the bandwidth cap.
Can you use Vercel Hobby for commercial projects?
No. This is the most important of the Vercel free plan limits, and it isn't a usage number. Vercel's fair use guidelines say:
"Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan."
Vercel defines commercial use broadly: a deployment used for the financial gain of anyone involved in any part of its production. That includes a paid employee or consultant writing the code. Its examples include:
- Taking payments through the site.
- Advertising a product or service, including your own business.
- Being paid to build or host the site for someone else.
- Sites whose primary purpose is affiliate linking.
- Running ads.
Donations are explicitly not commercial use, so a personal project with a "buy me a coffee" link is fine.
We cover which free hosts allow business sites in free static hosting for commercial use.
What happens if you exceed Vercel's Hobby limits?
Hobby has no paid overages. According to the Hobby plan docs, if you go over an included allowance you generally have to wait 30 days before you can use that feature again. The alternative is upgrading to Pro.
That's predictable in one sense: you won't get a surprise bill. But it means a traffic spike can make part of your site unavailable for weeks. If your site has to stay up, keep an eye on the usage page and set up alerts where available.
Other Hobby restrictions to know about
- One developer seat. There's no team collaboration on Hobby.
- No Git organisation repos. You can't connect repositories owned by a GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket organisation.
- No built-in forms. Vercel serves files and runs functions; it doesn't collect form submissions for you.
How can you stay within the Vercel Hobby limits?
- Optimise images before upload, or use the 5,000 monthly image transformations sparingly.
- Cache static assets with long-lived headers so repeat visitors don't re-download them.
- Keep large files off Vercel. Videos and big downloads eat into the 100 GB of transfer quickly.
- Prefer static output over per-request rendering where the content rarely changes, to save function invocations and Active CPU.
When should you upgrade from Vercel Hobby to Pro?
Upgrade when any of these is true:
- The site makes money or promotes a business, directly or indirectly.
- Someone is paid to build or maintain it.
- More than one person needs to deploy.
- The repo lives in a Git organisation.
- You regularly come close to the transfer, request or function allowances and can't risk a 30-day lockout.
If none of those apply, Hobby is one of the most capable free plans around, especially for Next.js projects that use functions and image optimisation.
How does Vercel Hobby compare with other free hosts?
Vercel's strengths are its framework support, fast previews and generous function allowances. Its weaknesses for static sites are the non-commercial rule and the 30-day wait at the limit.
| Vercel Hobby | Netlify Free (credits) | Cloudflare Pages Free | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 100 GB Fast Data Transfer | 20 credits/GB from 300 credits | Static requests unlimited |
| Commercial use | Not allowed | No restriction found | No restriction found |
| At the limit | Wait 30 days or upgrade | All sites paused | Functions return Error 1027 |
| Built-in forms | No | Yes (unlimited) | No |
See Netlify free plan limits and Cloudflare Pages free plan limits for the detail, or Netlify vs Vercel vs Cloudflare Pages for a head-to-head.
Add a working contact form to your static site
A static page on Vercel can't process a form POST by itself, so you either write a function or send the form somewhere else. The simplest route is to point the form's action at a FormSubmit endpoint, which handles spam filtering and email notifications. The free plan includes 1 form and 50 submissions a month, and our Vercel static site form guide walks through it.
