- Price
- Pro at $20/month per developer seat, with $20 of usage credit
- Free plan
- Yes
- Setup
- A little code
- Up and running
- About 15 minutes for a Next.js app already on GitHub.
What Vercel is for
Hosting is what keeps your app online for anyone to open. Vercel, the company behind Next.js, takes your code from GitHub, builds it and puts it live, plus a private preview link for every change so you can test before customers see it. No server to set up.
How it plugs into your product
- 1Sign up with GitHub and import the repository; Vercel detects the framework on its own.
- 2Add your secret keys (database, payments) as environment variables.
- 3Upgrade to Pro before you charge anyone, since the free Hobby plan is non-commercial only.
- 4Connect your domain and set a spend amount with pausing turned on.
Does it fit your idea?
It fits if
- A SaaS built in Next.js where you want each pull request to get its own preview link.
- A paid product with one or two developers, where $20 to $40 a month for hosting is fine.
- A personal project or prototype with no payments, ads or clients, which can stay on the free plan.
Look elsewhere if
- You want to sell or show ads from day one and can't pay $20 a month yet.
- Your back end runs long tasks (video, large imports) that take more than a few minutes per request.
- A team of five developers would pay $100 a month in seats alone.
What people only find out after building
Read this before you build on it. Each item links to the official page that says so.
Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. Taking payments, advertising a product, showing ads or being paid to build the site all count as commercial and require Pro.
Official source: vercel.comIf you pass a Hobby limit, in most cases you wait 30 days before that feature works again. There is no way to pay for extra on the free plan.
Official source: vercel.comOn Pro, usage past the $20 credit is billed automatically. New teams only get an email alert at $200 by default; your sites keep running and billing unless you turn on Pause Production Deployments.
Official source: vercel.comThe spend pause is checked every few minutes, not instantly, and when it fires every production site on the team goes offline with a 503 until you resume each one by hand.
Official source: vercel.comA function runs for at most 5 minutes on Hobby and Pro by default (800 seconds when configured on Pro), so long background jobs need another service.
Official source: vercel.com
Price
Pro at $20/month per developer seat, with $20 of usage credit
Hobby plan: 100 GB of transfer and 1M function invocations a month, for personal non-commercial use only.
- Free tier
- 100 GB transfer, 1M functions/mo (non-commercial)
- First paid plan
- Pro: $20/month per seat
- Best for
- Next.js and React front ends
Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing
What it costs in practice
A Next.js SaaS with one developer, 200 GB of traffic and light API use: Pro is $20/month with $20 of usage credit, and Flat Rate CDN covers up to 1 TB of transfer, so it usually stays at $20. A second developer adds $20. Estimate.
Estimate from the official price. Check it before you decide.
At a glance
- Free plan: yes
- Open source: no
“Not stated” means the official site doesn’t say.
Alternatives
Compare side by side
Faundr
Picked your tools? Build it with AI, safely.
Faundr keeps your project’s memory, blocks what can’t be undone and tells you if it’s safe to launch, inside Claude Code and Codex.