Every figure on this page was read off vercel.com/pricing on 29 August 2026. Vercel charges a flat seat fee plus metered usage, so the $20 sticker on Pro is the first line of the invoice and almost never the last. Below is the published rate card, the arithmetic that turns it into a monthly bill, and the traffic level where a server you rent yourself costs less.
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Vercel pricing has three tiers: Hobby is $0 but is licensed for personal, non commercial use only, Pro is $20 per developer seat per month, and Enterprise is quoted. Pro includes $20 of monthly usage credit, 1 TB of fast data transfer, 10 million edge requests and 1 million function invocations. Past those, you pay $0.15 per GB of transfer, $2 per million edge requests and $0.60 per million invocations, which is where most surprise Vercel bills come from.
Last updated August 2026
Pro is billed at $20 per developer seat per month, and seats are unlimited in the sense that you can add as many as you like at $20 each. A four person team starts at $80 a month before a single byte is served. Hobby includes exactly one seat. This is the only part of the Vercel bill you can predict perfectly at the start of the month.
Pro includes 1 TB of fast data transfer a month and charges $0.15 per GB after that. Hobby includes 100 GB. A site that serves 3 TB is 2,000 GB over the allowance, which is $300 on top of the seat fee. Video, large images and uncached API responses move this number faster than page views do.
Pro includes 10 million edge requests a month then charges $2 per million. Hobby includes 1 million. Every asset, font, API call and prefetch is a request, so a single page view routinely costs you twenty of them. Teams consistently underestimate this line by an order of magnitude when they budget.
Both Hobby and Pro include 1 million function invocations a month. Pro then charges $0.60 per million. Separately, Fluid active CPU is metered at $0.128 per hour on Pro, while Hobby caps you at 4 hours of active CPU a month in total. Server rendered pages and route handlers both draw on this.
Incremental Static Regeneration is metered separately. Pro charges $0.40 per million reads and $4 per million writes. Hobby is limited to 1 million reads and 200,000 writes a month. Writes are twenty times the price of an equivalent volume of reads, so a short revalidate interval on a large catalogue is expensive in a way that is genuinely hard to see coming.
Pro includes 5,000 image transformations a month and charges $0.05 per 1,000 after that. A transform is a unique combination of source image, width and format, so a responsive image set across four breakpoints and two formats is eight transforms from one upload. A product catalogue crosses the included allowance on its first crawl.
Multiply the number of people who need to log in to Vercel by $20. That is your floor and it is charged whether you ship anything or not. Contractors and designers who only need to view a preview URL do not need a seat, so audit the list honestly. This number alone decides whether Vercel is cheap for you.
Take last month's gigabytes served and total requests from your analytics or from Vercel's own usage dashboard. Do not estimate from page views. Subtract the 1 TB and 10 million included on Pro, then price the remainder at $0.15 per GB and $2 per million. This is almost always the largest variable line.
Invocations over 1 million cost $0.60 per million, active CPU is $0.128 an hour, ISR reads are $0.40 per million and writes $4 per million, and image transforms are $0.05 per 1,000 over the first 5,000. Add them, then subtract the $20 of included monthly credit once.
A DigitalOcean droplet at $24 a month carries 4 GB of RAM, 2 vCPUs and 4,000 GB of transfer at a flat rate, with no per request or per invocation meter at all. Compare that flat number against the total from step three. If your bill is dominated by transfer rather than by seats, the gap is usually large.
These are Vercel's published plan allowances and overage rates, not our estimates. Where a cell says custom, Vercel does not publish a figure and neither will we. The one number that is not on this table is what your own app will burn, because that depends entirely on how much you serve and how much of it is cached.
swipe to see all columns →
| Hobby | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | $0 | $20 per seat | Custom |
| Licensed for commercial use | No, personal projects only | Yes | Yes |
| Developer seats included | 1 | Unlimited at $20 each | Custom |
| Included usage credit | None | $20 per month | Custom |
| Fast data transfer included | 100 GB | 1 TB | Custom |
| Transfer overage | Not available | $0.15 per GB | Custom |
| Edge requests included | 1 million | 10 million | Custom |
| Edge request overage | Not available | $2 per million | Custom |
| Function invocations included | 1 million | 1 million | Custom |
| Invocation overage | Not available | $0.60 per million | Custom |
| Fluid active CPU | 4 hours per month | $0.128 per hour | Custom |
| ISR reads and writes | 1M reads, 200k writes | $0.40 and $4 per million | Custom |
| Image transformations | Included allowance | 5,000 then $0.05 per 1,000 | Custom |
| Custom firewall rules | Up to 3 | Up to 40 | Up to 1,000 |
| Build minutes | Not available | Included | Included |
| SAML SSO and audit logs | Not available | Not available | Included |
Vercel wins this outright and we will not pretend otherwise. One seat at $20, traffic comfortably inside 1 TB and 10 million requests, nothing to patch and nothing to monitor. The $20 credit absorbs the small usage lines. There is no honest argument for renting and managing a server to save eight dollars a month.
This is where the model turns. Transfer is the dominant line at $0.15 per GB with only 1 TB included, and a media heavy site at 5 TB pays roughly $600 a month in transfer alone. The same 5 TB fits inside the flat allowance on a $48 droplet. If your traffic is bytes rather than logic, you are paying edge network prices for what is really file serving.
Seats multiply by people and usage multiplies by clients, and neither is shared across projects in a way that helps you. Twenty small sites that would each sit happily on a fraction of one server still draw one pooled usage bill and a seat for every person who touches them. One provisioned server hosting all twenty at a flat monthly fee is a different order of cost.
SAML SSO, audit logs and the higher firewall rule limits are Enterprise only, and Enterprise is quoted rather than published. If compliance requires those controls, you cannot price your own Vercel bill from the public page at all. Running your own infrastructure keeps identity and access in systems you already pay for.
Vercel costs $0 a month on Hobby, $20 per developer seat per month on Pro, and a quoted figure on Enterprise, plus metered usage on top of the Pro seat fee. Every Pro team gets $20 of included usage credit each month, so light usage is effectively absorbed. Heavy usage is not, and the overage rates are where a $20 plan becomes a $400 invoice.
Because usage is genuinely variable, a single sticker price is impossible. So here is the arithmetic instead. The three scenarios below use Vercel's own published rates and nothing else. They are our calculation from that rate card, not packages Vercel quotes.
One seat, 50 GB of transfer, 3 million edge requests, 200,000 function invocations. Everything sits inside the Pro allowances. Total: $20.00 a month. Vercel is the right answer here and the rest of this page does not apply to you.
Three seats at $20 is $60. Transfer of 1.5 TB is 500 GB over the included terabyte, at $0.15 per GB, which is $75. Edge requests of 12 million are 2 million over, at $2 per million, which is $4.00. Function invocations of 3 million are 2 million over, at $0.60 per million, which is $1.20. Usage comes to $80.20, less the $20 included credit, leaving $60.20. Total: $120.20 a month.
One seat is $20. Transfer of 5 TB is 4,000 GB over, at $0.15 per GB, which is $600. Edge requests of 40 million are 30 million over, at $2 per million, which is $60. Invocations of 10 million are 9 million over, at $0.60 per million, which is $5.40. Usage totals $665.40, less the $20 credit, leaving $645.40. Total: $665.40 a month.
That third number is the one worth sitting with. The workload is one website. The dominant cost is bytes leaving a server, and bytes leaving a server is the cheapest thing in hosting when you buy it from anyone other than an edge platform.
Vercel Pro pricing is $20 per developer seat per month. That fee buys commercial licensing, unlimited seats at the same per seat rate, build minutes, up to 40 custom firewall rules, and an allowance of 1 TB fast data transfer, 10 million edge requests and 1 million function invocations, plus $20 of usage credit.
The important structural point is that Pro is the first tier you are actually allowed to run a business on. Vercel designates Hobby as being for personal, non commercial use. A freelancer hosting a paying client's site on Hobby is outside the terms, regardless of how little traffic it serves.
Pro is also where the meter switches on. Hobby simply stops when you hit a limit; overages are marked not available. Pro keeps serving and bills you, which is the correct behaviour for a production site and the reason bills can move sharply without anyone changing the code.
| Resource | Included on Pro | Rate after that |
|---|---|---|
| Fast data transfer | 1 TB | $0.15 per GB |
| Edge requests | 10 million | $2 per million |
| Function invocations | 1 million | $0.60 per million |
| Fluid active CPU | Included credit applies | $0.128 per hour |
| ISR reads | Included credit applies | $0.40 per million |
| ISR writes | Included credit applies | $4 per million |
| Image transformations | 5,000 | $0.05 per 1,000 |
| Developer seats | 1 at the base price | $20 each per month |
Those eight rows are the entire variable part of a Pro invoice. If you can put a monthly number against each one, you can predict your bill to within a few dollars.
Vercel's Hobby plan is free at $0 a month, but Vercel designates it for personal, non commercial use. That single line is the one most people miss. Client work, anything with a payment form, and anything that exists to make money all belong on Pro at $20 a seat.
Hobby is also capped rather than metered. It includes 1 million edge requests, 100 GB of fast data transfer, 1 million function invocations, 4 hours of Fluid active CPU, one seat and up to three custom firewall rules, with ISR limited to 1 million reads and 200,000 writes. Build minutes, webhook triggers, SAML SSO and advanced deployment protection are all marked not available.
For a personal blog, a portfolio or a genuine side project, that allowance is generous and the plan is excellent. It is a deliberately good free tier. It is simply not a commercial hosting plan, and treating it as one is a licensing problem rather than a technical one.
In most cases it is fast data transfer, because it has the smallest allowance relative to how fast it grows and the highest unit price of the metered lines at $0.15 per GB. Transfer scales with bytes served, not with visits, so one uncompressed hero video or a set of unoptimized images can move the number more than a traffic spike does.
The second most common cause is edge requests. Pro includes 10 million and charges $2 per million after. People budget against page views, but a single page view fires a request for the document and then one for every font, script, stylesheet, image and API call it triggers. A ratio of twenty requests per page view is ordinary, which turns 500,000 page views into 10 million requests on its own.
The third is ISR writes at $4 per million, twenty times the read rate. A short revalidation window across a large number of paths generates writes continuously in the background whether anyone is reading those pages or not. It is the least visible line on the invoice and the easiest one to set badly in a config file months earlier.
None of these are Vercel behaving unfairly. They are the honest cost of a metered global edge network. The question is whether your particular workload needs one.
The comparison is not close on flat cost, and it is not close in Vercel's favour on capability either. They are different products and the right one depends entirely on where your bill is concentrated.
| Workload | Vercel Pro, our calculation | DigitalOcean droplet, flat |
|---|---|---|
| 1 seat, 50 GB transfer | $20.00 | $12.00 (2 GB, 2,000 GB transfer) |
| 3 seats, 1.5 TB transfer | $120.20 | $24.00 (4 GB, 4,000 GB transfer) |
| 1 seat, 5 TB transfer | $665.40 | $48.00 (8 GB, 5,000 GB transfer) |
Droplet prices were re read off digitalocean.com on 29 August 2026. The Vercel figures are our arithmetic from Vercel's published rates, shown in full further up this page so you can check them.
A global edge network in dozens of regions, first party Next.js support from the company that writes the framework, preview deployments on every pull request, and zero operational work. If latency in Sydney and Frankfurt matters to your revenue, a single droplet in Virginia is not a substitute and no amount of arithmetic makes it one. If nobody on your team wants to think about a server ever, that has real value too.
Flat, predictable cost. Bandwidth measured in terabytes rather than gigabytes. Any runtime you like rather than the ones the platform supports. Databases, cron jobs, queue workers and mailboxes on the same box at no extra meter. Root access, and a bill that does not change because a post did well.
DeployManage sits on that second side. It provisions the server on your own cloud account, sets up nginx, PHP or Node, certificates, firewall and cron, and runs zero downtime deployments from your git repository with one click rollback. You keep root and you keep the flat bill.
Start with cache headers, because uncached responses are the single biggest multiplier on both transfer and edge requests. Anything static should carry a long max age and an immutable directive so browsers and the edge stop asking for it again. This alone often cuts request counts by more than half.
Then audit seats. At $20 each, three unused logins is $720 a year for nothing. Designers and stakeholders who only read preview URLs do not need a seat.
Then look at images. The included 5,000 transformations sound like a lot until you count a responsive set across breakpoints and formats as separate transforms. Fixing the number of widths you generate is usually a one line change.
Finally, lengthen ISR revalidation windows. Writes are $4 per million against $0.40 for reads, so a page revalidating every sixty seconds costs sixty times what the same page costs revalidating every hour, and for most content nobody can tell the difference.
If you do all four and the bill is still dominated by transfer, the problem is structural rather than configurational, and that is the point at which moving the workload to a server you rent is worth pricing properly.
Custom domains are included in the plan rather than billed per domain, so adding a domain to a Pro project does not add a line to the invoice. Buying a domain through Vercel is a separate registrar purchase priced per domain per year like any other registrar, and that is distinct from hosting cost.
Bandwidth is billed, and it is the line Vercel calls fast data transfer. Pro includes 1 TB a month and charges $0.15 per GB beyond it. Hobby includes 100 GB and does not offer overage at all, so a Hobby project that exceeds the allowance stops rather than bills.
It is worth being precise here because the two get conflated constantly. Vercel does not meter you per domain or per project. It meters you per byte, per request, per invocation and per seat. Adding a fifth site to an existing Pro team costs nothing until that site serves traffic.
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$ get started freeVercel costs $0 a month on Hobby, $20 per developer seat per month on Pro, and a custom quoted figure on Enterprise. Pro adds metered usage on top of the seat fee, with $20 of included monthly credit, 1 TB of fast data transfer, 10 million edge requests and 1 million function invocations included before overages begin.
A single seat Pro team with light traffic costs $20 a month. A three person team serving 1.5 TB works out around $120 a month on Vercel's published rates. A one seat content site serving 5 TB comes to roughly $665 a month, almost entirely from transfer overage at $0.15 per GB. Usage, not the plan, decides your number.
Vercel Pro is $20 per developer seat per month. It includes commercial licensing, build minutes, up to 40 custom firewall rules, $20 of usage credit, 1 TB of fast data transfer, 10 million edge requests and 1 million function invocations. Extra seats are $20 each per month with no cap on how many you add.
Vercel's Hobby plan is free at $0 a month, but Vercel designates it for personal, non commercial use. It includes one seat, 100 GB of fast data transfer, 1 million edge requests, 1 million function invocations and 4 hours of active CPU. Commercial and client work requires Pro at $20 a seat.
No. Vercel's pricing page designates the Hobby plan for personal, non commercial use, and client work is commercial by definition regardless of how little traffic the site serves. A freelancer or agency hosting a paying client's site needs Pro at $20 per seat per month.
Vercel bills bandwidth as fast data transfer. The Pro plan includes 1 TB a month and charges $0.15 per GB after that. Hobby includes 100 GB with no overage available, so a Hobby project stops rather than billing. At $0.15 per GB, an extra terabyte of traffic adds about $150 to a monthly invoice.
Fast data transfer is the usual cause, at $0.15 per GB with only 1 TB included on Pro. Edge requests are second, at $2 per million after the first 10 million, and a single page view commonly fires twenty of them. ISR writes at $4 per million are the third and least visible cause.
Vercel does not publish an Enterprise price. The plan is quoted per customer and adds SAML SSO, audit logs, up to 1,000 custom firewall rules, higher limits, SLAs and dedicated support. Because no figure is published, no honest estimate is possible without contacting Vercel's sales team directly.
Yes. Vercel Pro is priced per developer seat at $20 per seat per month, and there is no cap on the number of seats you can add. A four person team pays $80 a month before any usage. Hobby includes exactly one seat and cannot be expanded.
Both Hobby and Pro include 1 million function invocations a month. Pro charges $0.60 per million after that. Compute time behind those invocations is metered separately as Fluid active CPU at $0.128 per hour on Pro, while Hobby caps total active CPU at 4 hours a month.
Pro includes 5,000 image transformations a month and charges $0.05 per 1,000 after that. A transformation is a unique combination of source image, width and format, so one uploaded photo rendered at four breakpoints in two formats counts as eight transformations rather than one.
For a single small site, yes: $20 on Pro against roughly $12 for a comparable droplet is close enough that the operational saving wins. Above about 1 TB of monthly transfer it reverses sharply, because a $24 droplet includes 4,000 GB of transfer flat where Vercel charges $0.15 per GB over its first terabyte.
Yes, custom domains are included in the plan rather than billed individually, so attaching a domain to a Pro project adds nothing to the invoice. Registering a domain through Vercel is a separate registrar purchase billed per domain per year, which is distinct from the hosting cost itself.
Provision a server on your own DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS or Vultr account and deploy the same app to it from git, with atomic zero downtime releases, one click rollback, certificates, firewall, cron, queue workers and per domain mailboxes managed from a single panel. Bandwidth comes in terabytes at a flat rate. Free to start.
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