A client rang me last March, a solo founder who'd built a Next.js app, shipped it on Vercel's Hobby plan, and then sent a product hunt launch out to 4,000 subscribers. By 11am his site was throttled and his Serverless Function invocations had crossed the monthly ceiling in a single morning. He was convinced Vercel had broken something. It hadn't. He'd just never actually read what "free" meant.
This happens more than it should. Vercel's free tier is genuinely useful, but the marketing around it creates a gap between what people expect and what they actually get. So let's close that gap.
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What Vercel's Hobby Plan Actually Includes
The Hobby plan is free, permanent (not a trial), and covers a surprising amount of ground for personal projects. Here's what you're working with as of 2024:
- Bandwidth: 100 GB per month
- Serverless Function execution: 100 GB-hours per month
- Edge Function invocations: 500,000 per month
- Build minutes: 6,000 per month
- Deployments: Unlimited (yes, really)
- Concurrent builds: 1
- Custom domains: Supported
- HTTPS/SSL: Automatic via Let's Encrypt
- Analytics: Basic (not the full Web Analytics product)
- Team members: Just you. No collaborators.
That list looks solid. And for a portfolio site, a side project, or a low-traffic blog, it genuinely is. I've used the Hobby plan myself for personal experiments, including a small tool I built in 2022 that scraped public planning applications in Southwark. Ran perfectly for months without me thinking about it once.
But the moment you're building for someone else, or expecting real traffic, you need to read past the headline numbers.
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The Part Nobody Reads: Commercial Use Is Not Allowed
This is the one that catches people out most badly. Vercel's Terms of Service explicitly state that the Hobby plan is for non-commercial personal projects. You cannot use it for a client site. You cannot use it to run a SaaS you're charging for. You cannot use it for a business, even if the traffic is low.
I'm not being alarmist. Vercel doesn't send cease-and-desist letters the moment you put a Stripe button on something. But if you read the terms, you're in breach the second money is involved.
When I first started using Vercel back in 2020, I nearly deployed a small e-commerce client project to Hobby because I thought "it's just a test deployment". Caught myself at the last minute. The Pro plan at $20/month per user is the threshold where commercial use becomes permitted, and honestly, for a client project, that's not a lot of money to have above-board hosting.
If you're an agency or a freelancer, this matters legally, not just technically.
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Serverless Functions: Where the Free Plan Gets Tight Fast
The 100 GB-hours monthly limit for Serverless Functions sounds enormous. It isn't, depending on what you're doing.
How GB-hours actually work
GB-hours = (memory allocated in GB) × (execution time in hours). A function running at 1024 MB (1 GB) for one second uses roughly 0.000278 GB-hours. That sounds tiny. But if you have an API route that fires on every page interaction, and you're getting reasonable traffic, the seconds stack up.
Vercel's default function memory is 1024 MB. Duration limit on Hobby is 10 seconds per invocation. On Pro, that goes up to 60 seconds, and on Enterprise you can configure much longer. If your function needs to call an external API, do some computation, and write to a database, 10 seconds is actually a hard constraint.
I had a Seahawk project last year where a client wanted AI-generated image alt text on upload, using OpenAI's API. On Hobby the timeout would have killed the function before the response came back half the time. We were on Pro by then, but if someone tried to build that on Hobby, they'd be debugging a problem that isn't a bug.
Cold starts
Hobby functions cold-start more aggressively than Pro. Vercel doesn't publish exact numbers on this, but the Vercel documentation is transparent that Hobby has fewer resources allocated. For a low-traffic site with infrequent function calls, cold starts of 800ms to 1.5 seconds are normal. For anything requiring snappy API responses, that's noticeable.
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Bandwidth and Build Minutes: Less Scary Than You'd Think
100 GB of bandwidth per month is enough for most personal projects. A typical Next.js blog with optimised images and a CDN doing its job won't touch 10 GB. The bandwidth ceiling becomes relevant when you're serving video, large files, or genuinely high-traffic pages with unoptimised assets.
Build minutes are even more comfortable. 6,000 minutes per month is 100 hours. Even if you're running frequent deployments on a busy project, you'd have to try hard to exceed that. I've never seen a solo developer hit the build minute ceiling on Hobby doing normal work.
One thing to watch: Vercel counts all builds including preview deployments triggered by pull requests. If you're using GitHub integration and opening a lot of PRs, those add up. Still unlikely to be a problem, but worth knowing.
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What Happens When You Go Over Limits
On Hobby, Vercel doesn't charge you for overages. That sounds good. It isn't necessarily.
What they do instead is stop serving your site or throttle functions once you hit certain ceilings. There's no grace period, no email warning at 80%, no automatic upgrade. Your site goes down (or your functions stop responding) until the monthly reset.
This is exactly what happened to my client in March. He hadn't set up any usage alerts, hadn't thought about the invocation cap, and found out the hard way. On Pro, overages are charged (which at least keeps the site running). On Hobby, the experience is binary: working, then not.
Vercel does offer a usage dashboard, and you can set up notifications. Do that on day one. Go to your project settings, find the usage section, and set email alerts. It takes three minutes and it has saved me from embarrassing client calls before.
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The One Collaborator Limit Is a Real Problem
No team members. Full stop. You can't add a client to review deployments. You can't bring in a second developer to push code. You can't give a designer preview access through the Vercel dashboard.
For freelancers, this is probably the most practically annoying constraint. The Pro plan ($20/month per seat) changes this, and for any project where someone else needs Vercel dashboard access, you're essentially forced up to Pro.
There's a workaround of sorts: you can share preview URLs with anyone without giving them a Vercel account. That covers client reviews fine. But if a second developer needs to deploy or manage environment variables, Hobby doesn't support it.
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When Hobby Is Actually the Right Answer
Look, I don't want to make this sound like the Hobby plan is useless. It's not.
Here's when I'd tell someone to stay on it without hesitation:
- You're building a portfolio site for yourself
- It's a personal side project with no revenue attached
- You're learning Next.js and want a real deployment environment
- You're prototyping something before deciding if it's worth building properly
- You're running a static site or a very low-JS app where Serverless Functions barely come into play
The free CDN, automatic SSL, and instant Git-connected deployments are genuinely good. Vercel built something excellent here. For personal use, the Hobby plan is one of the best free hosting products available. Netlify's free tier is comparable and worth considering alongside it, though Netlify has its own set of limits.
The problems only start when people treat Hobby as a production tier for real projects.
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Hobby vs Pro: The Actual Upgrade Decision
The Pro plan is $20/month per team member. For a solo developer working on one commercial project, that's $20/month. For context, that's less than a Figma seat.
The things that meaningfully change on Pro:
- Commercial use is permitted
- Function timeout goes from 10 seconds to 60 seconds
- Bandwidth increases to 1 TB
- Serverless Function execution increases to 1,000 GB-hours
- You can add team members
- Concurrent builds go up to 12
- You get proper Web Analytics
- Better support response times
If you're billing a client for a project, the hosting should be on Pro. Either the client pays for it directly (ideal) or you build it into your project cost. $20/month should never be the reason a client site is on a plan that legally prohibits commercial use.
For larger organisations with compliance requirements, SSO, or guaranteed SLAs, there's Enterprise, which is custom-priced. Vercel publishes a full plan comparison that's worth bookmarking.
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FAQ
Can I run a client website on Vercel's Hobby plan?
No. Vercel's terms explicitly restrict Hobby to personal, non-commercial projects. If a client is paying you, or if the site generates revenue in any form, you need the Pro plan. It's $20/month, and it's the correct thing to do both legally and ethically.
Does Vercel's free plan support custom domains?
Yes. You can attach a custom domain to a Hobby project at no extra cost. SSL is handled automatically. This is one area where Vercel is genuinely generous compared to some competitors.
What happens if I exceed bandwidth or function limits on Hobby?
Vercel doesn't bill you for overages on Hobby. Instead, your site or functions get throttled or stopped until the monthly reset. There's no automatic upgrade or grace period. Set usage alerts in your project dashboard so you're not caught off guard.
Is Vercel Hobby good for Next.js development?
For learning and personal projects, absolutely yes. The Git integration, preview deployments, and automatic SSL make it a very good development environment. The limits only become relevant when you're shipping something with real traffic or commercial intent.
How does Vercel Hobby compare to Netlify's free tier?
They're broadly similar. Both offer free SSL, Git-based deployments, and CDN delivery. Netlify's free tier gives you 100 GB bandwidth and 125,000 serverless function requests per month (with a 10-second timeout). Vercel's Edge Network is generally considered faster for Next.js specifically, which makes sense given Vercel built Next.js. For non-Next.js projects, the choice is less obvious and comes down to personal preference.
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The Hobby plan is not a trick. It's not bait-and-switch. It does exactly what it says for the use case it was designed for. The mistake is treating it as something it isn't. If you're building something real, commercial, or collaborative, spend the $20. If you're building for yourself, Hobby is legitimately excellent and I've recommended it to junior developers at Seahawk as the first place to learn deployment without the overhead of managing a server.
Know what you're running. Read the limits once. Then get on with building.