TL;DR / Key Takeaways
- Vercel's free Hobby plan is non-commercial only; ads and affiliate links count as commercial.
- Netlify's free plan pauses every site when its 300 monthly credits run out.
- Cloudflare Pages serves static files free and unlimited, with no egress fees.
- 100 GB a month costs from $0 (Cloudflare) to about $36 (Render Pro), by our math.
- Railway and Fly.io are the cheapest pay-as-you-go options for full-stack apps.
Short answer: Vercel's free Hobby plan is for non-commercial projects only (ads, affiliate links and taking payments all count as commercial), and Netlify's free plan pauses your sites when its 300 monthly credits run out. For a commercial static or front-end site, Cloudflare Pages serves static files free and unlimited. For a full-stack app, Railway and Fly.io are pay-as-you-go from a few dollars a month, and Netlify and Vercel Pro both start at $20. Updated October 30, 2026.
How we checked: plans, limits and usage rates come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation, read October 30, 2026. The 100 GB table is our own arithmetic on those published rates for static traffic; your bill also depends on builds, functions and compute. We did not benchmark speed or uptime.
Free tiers: what they allow and what happens at the limit
| Platform | Free tier | At the limit | Commercial use on free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Hobby | 100 GB transfer, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU-hours | Wait up to 30 days for the feature to come back | No: ads, affiliate links, payments and client work count as commercial |
| Netlify Free | 300 credits a month (about 15 GB of bandwidth at 20 credits per GB) | All projects are paused: visitors see Site not available | Not stated |
| Cloudflare Pages | Static requests free and unlimited; 500 builds a month | Builds and Workers requests capped (100,000 a day) | Not stated |
| Render | Static sites free; web services sleep after 15 minutes idle | Services suspended; free Postgres expires after 30 days | Render says not for production |
| Railway | One-time $5 trial credit, then $1 a month | Workloads stop when credit runs out | Not stated |
| Fly.io | No free tier; trial of 2 machine-hours or 7 days | Trial ends | Paid only |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | 3 static sites, 1 GiB transfer each | $0.02 per extra GiB | Not stated |
| Firebase Hosting | 10 GB storage, 360 MB transfer a day | Upgrade to Blaze (pay as you go) | Not stated |
What 100 GB of traffic a month costs
| Platform | Plan needed | Approximate monthly cost (our math) |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Free (static) | $0 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Free static site plus transfer overage | About $2 |
| Fly.io | Smallest machine ($2.19) plus $0.02/GB egress | About $4 |
| Railway | Hobby ($5, includes $5 of usage) plus $0.05/GB egress | From about $10, plus compute |
| AWS Amplify | Pay as you go at $0.15/GB after 15 GB free | About $13 |
| Firebase Hosting | Blaze at $0.15/GB after the free daily allowance | About $13 |
| Netlify | 2,000 credits: Personal ($9) plus two packs, or Pro ($20) | About $19 to $20 |
| Vercel | Pro ($20 per seat, 1 TB included) | $20 |
| Render | Pro ($25, 25 GB) plus $0.15/GB | About $36 |
Vercel
Vercel is the default for Next.js. Pro is $20 per developer seat a month (viewer seats are free) and includes $20 of usage credit and 1 TB of transfer; beyond that it bills pay as you go, uncapped, with a default $200 spend alert for new teams. Since September 2026 Pro teams can opt into a Flat Rate CDN that moves you up a tier instead of billing overage.
Netlify
Netlify switched new accounts (created from September 4, 2025) to credits. Free is 300 credits a month as a hard cap; Personal is $9 for 1,000; Pro is $20 for 3,000 with unlimited members, and extra packs are $5 or $10. A production deploy costs 15 credits, a GB of bandwidth 20, and deploy previews and forms are free. Build minutes are no longer metered.
Cloudflare, Render, Railway and Fly.io
- Cloudflare Pages: static requests are free and unlimited on every plan, with no egress fees; dynamic code runs on Workers, $5 a month minimum for 10 million requests.
- Render: free static sites forever; paid workspaces are $25 a month flat with unlimited members (since April 2026), with 25 GB of bandwidth included.
- Railway: Hobby is $5 a month including $5 of usage, billed per vCPU, GB of RAM and GB of egress. If you pay with credits and the balance hits zero, everything stops.
- Fly.io: no platform fee and no free tier; the smallest machine costs $2.19 a month and egress is $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe.
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Which one to choose
- Commercial static or marketing site, lowest cost: Cloudflare Pages.
- Next.js app, team that wants zero setup: Vercel Pro, or Netlify Pro at the same $20.
- Back end, database and workers in one place: Railway or Render.
- Servers close to users worldwide: Fly.io.
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Frequently asked questions
Can I use Vercel's free plan for a commercial site?
No. Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial use only. Its fair-use guidelines count taking payments, advertising a product, client work, affiliate-link sites and ads such as AdSense as commercial, which requires the $20-a-seat Pro plan.
What happens when Netlify's free plan runs out?
Netlify's Free plan has 300 credits a month as a hard limit. When they run out, all projects are paused and visitors see Site not available until the next month or an upgrade.
What is the cheapest alternative to Vercel?
For static sites, Cloudflare Pages: static requests are free and unlimited with no egress fees. For apps with a back end, Fly.io (from about $2 a month plus usage) and Railway (from $5 a month including $5 of usage) are the cheapest we compared.
Netlify or Vercel?
Both paid plans start at $20 a month. Vercel prices per developer seat and includes 1 TB of transfer; Netlify Pro has unlimited members and 3,000 credits (about 150 GB of bandwidth at 20 credits per GB), with cheaper top-up packs.