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Vercel Hobby in 2026: Free Hosting for Personal Projects, Not for Your Shop

Vercel Hobby in 2026: Free Hosting for Personal Projects, Not for Your Shop

One-line takeaway: Vercel's Hobby plan is $0 with 100 GB of monthly data transfer and 1 million edge requests — generous for a portfolio, a demo, or a learning project. But it has a rule that matters more than any quota: personal, non-commercial use only. If the site earns money or serves a client, you need Pro at $20 per seat per month.

What you need

  • A GitHub account (the smoothest way to import a project into Vercel)
  • A public code repository: a static site, Next.js, or React app — not a heavy backend workload
  • A decision up front: will this site ever take money or serve a client? If yes, do not start on Hobby

Steps

Step 1: Read the pricing page and take in the whole Hobby allowance at once

Vercel pricing: Hobby $0, Pro $20 per seat per month

Open Vercel's pricing page. The Hobby allowance, per official-aligned third-party summaries from August–October 2026, is: 100 GB of fast data transfer per month, 1 million edge requests, 1 million function invocations, 4 hours of Fluid Active CPU, 360 GB-hours of provisioned memory, 1 GB of Blob storage, 1 team member, and unlimited deployments. Two details matter: Hobby cannot buy extra usage — when you exceed a limit, the resource pauses until the next cycle or until you upgrade; and build-minute figures differ across third-party pages, so this guide does not treat any build-minute number as firm — check the usage page inside your own account instead.

Step 2: Import from GitHub and deploy once to get a live URL

Vercel official documentation homepage

In the Vercel dashboard, choose Add New, then Project, and import a GitHub repository. The framework preset is usually auto-detected (Next.js, Vite, or plain static sites all get sensible defaults), so you rarely need to change the build command. Click Deploy, wait for the build, and you get a vercel.app subdomain. Push code to GitHub afterwards and Vercel redeploys automatically. If a build fails, read the build log first — a wrong framework preset or a missing environment variable is the usual cause, not the platform.

Step 3: Add a custom domain and watch the usage dashboard before you hit a limit

Vercel 2026 pricing breakdown: Hobby's non-commercial rule and the Pro comparison

Under Project Settings, then Domains, add your own domain, follow the DNS instructions, and wait for the HTTPS certificate to issue automatically. Then check Usage once a month: if data transfer is approaching 100 GB or function invocations are approaching 1 million, decide early whether to slim down (compress images, add caching) or upgrade. A personal blog or small tool rarely gets close; but at 3 MB per page, 100 GB only covers roughly 33,000 page views a month, so compress images before launch.

Notes, costs, and pitfalls

  • Cost: Hobby is $0; Pro is $20 per developer seat per month (including $20 of usage credit), with 1 TB of data transfer and 10 million edge requests; Enterprise is custom-priced. Prices are as shown on the pricing page at deploy time.
  • The biggest pitfall — the non-commercial rule: Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use only. A subscription store, a paid landing page, or a client project belongs on Pro, however small its traffic. Running a commercial site on Hobby violates the terms; it is not a clever saving.
  • How it compares: For Next.js projects, Vercel is the natural first choice (same-team optimization). For purely static sites, Netlify and GitHub Pages are equally viable — Netlify's credit system requires adding up deployments, bandwidth, and functions, while GitHub Pages is the simplest but weakest for dynamic features.
  • Track record: Vercel has no public record of suddenly killing its free tier, but its billing rules keep changing — 2026 moved from simple tiers to a mix of allowances and metered billing, so do not copy quota figures from a 2024 tutorial.
  • Pitfalls: ① Hobby does not charge overages — it stops serving, so never point event traffic at it. ② Hobby allows only 1 member; collaboration needs Pro. ③ Get the build passing locally first; missing environment variables are the most common deploy failure.

Sources