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Vercel charges per developer seat and then bills the traffic, requests and function time your project uses past what the plan includes. For a static or mostly cached frontend that often means the seat price and nothing else. For an app whose server code runs all day, the usage lines grow faster than the seats.
This post walks through each line on a Vercel bill, using list prices from Vercel’s pricing page as of 2026-10-27, and works three monthly bills.
TL;DR
- Hobby is $0 for personal, non-commercial projects, with usage capped at the included amounts. Pro is $20 per developer seat a month with $20 of usage included, then pay as you go. Viewer seats are free.
- Pro includes 1 TB of data transfer and 10 million edge requests a month. Past that, transfer starts at $0.15 per GB and edge requests at $2 per million.
- Server code bills three ways at once: invocations (from $0.60 per million), active CPU (from $0.128 per hour) and provisioned memory (from $0.0106 per GB-hour). Memory is usually the biggest of the three.
- A solo commercial app with modest traffic lands around $22 a month, before a database. The same app in a busy month passes $150, and Postgres comes from a Marketplace provider on its own bill.
- To price your own stack across Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly.io and Ownkube, use the cloud cost calculator.
What are Vercel’s plans?
| Plan | Price | Included usage | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $0 | Fixed allowances, no paid overage | Personal, non-commercial projects |
| Pro | $20 per developer seat a month | $20 of usage a month, plus 1 TB transfer and 10M edge requests | Commercial apps and teams |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Large organizations |
Two rules shape the choice. Hobby is for non-commercial use only, so a side project that starts taking payments has to move to Pro. And Hobby usage is capped: you cannot buy more, so a project that outgrows the allowances has to upgrade or wait for the next month.
Pro charges for each developer seat. Viewer seats, for people who only look at deployments and analytics, are free and unlimited.
What does each plan include?
| Resource | Hobby includes | Pro includes | Pro rate past the allowance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Data Transfer | 100 GB | 1 TB | from $0.15 per GB |
| Fast Origin Transfer | 10 GB | from the usage credit | from $0.06 per GB |
| Edge requests | 1M | 10M | from $2 per 1M |
| Function invocations | 1M | from the usage credit | from $0.60 per 1M |
| Active CPU | 4 hours | from the usage credit | from $0.128 per hour |
| Provisioned memory | 360 GB-hours | from the usage credit | from $0.0106 per GB-hour |
| Image transformations | 5,000 | from the usage credit | from $0.05 per 1,000 |
| Blob storage | 1 GB | from the usage credit | $0.023 per GB |
“From” matters on the transfer and request lines. Vercel prices them by region, and the rates above are the lowest. Traffic served from pricier regions bills higher.
How does Vercel bill server code?
Vercel runs server code (API routes, server rendering, middleware) as functions. Each function call bills on three meters:
- Invocations count every call, at $0.60 per million.
- Active CPU counts the time the CPU is actually working, at $0.128 per hour. Time spent waiting on a database or an API does not count here.
- Provisioned memory counts the memory reserved for the function for as long as it runs, waiting included, at $0.0106 per GB-hour.
The memory meter is the one that surprises people. A function with 2 GB of memory that waits 300 ms on a slow database bills 0.6 GB-seconds for that call, even if it used the CPU for 20 ms. An app that calls slow upstream services spends most of its function bill on waiting.
Functions also have a time limit: up to 300 seconds on Hobby and 800 seconds on Pro. Queue consumers, long imports and WebSocket servers need a process that stays up, which Vercel does not run.
What do builds cost?
Builds run on build machines, billed per minute by size.
| Build machine | Price per minute |
|---|---|
| Basic | $0.007 |
| Standard | $0.014 |
| Enhanced | $0.028 |
| Turbo | $0.105 |
| Elastic | $0.0035 per CPU-minute |
A team that pushes often and builds on larger machines will see this line. Six hundred minutes on Standard is $8.40 a month, and the same minutes on Turbo are $63.
What does a real Vercel bill look like?
Here are three common shapes priced from the rates above, assuming traffic served from the lowest-priced regions.
A personal site on Hobby
A portfolio and blog with 20 GB of transfer and 300,000 edge requests a month fits inside every Hobby allowance. The bill is $0, as long as the project stays non-commercial.
A solo commercial app on Pro
One developer seat. The app serves 300 GB of transfer and 4 million edge requests, both inside Pro’s allowances. Its server code makes 2 million invocations, uses 40 hours of active CPU and holds 1,500 GB-hours of memory.
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| Seat | $20.00 |
| Invocations: 2M x $0.60 | $1.20 |
| Active CPU: 40 h x $0.128 | $5.12 |
| Provisioned memory: 1,500 GB-h x $0.0106 | $15.90 |
| Usage | $22.22 |
| Included usage | -$20.00 |
| Bill | $22.22 |
The $20 of included usage covers most of the function time, so the bill is the seat plus $2.22. Postgres comes from a Marketplace provider and arrives on that provider’s bill.
The same app in a busy month
A launch week pushes the same app to 1.5 TB of transfer and 18 million edge requests, with 6 million invocations, 120 hours of active CPU and 4,000 GB-hours of memory.
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| Seat | $20.00 |
| Transfer past 1 TB: 500 GB x $0.15 | $75.00 |
| Edge requests past 10M: 8M x $2 | $16.00 |
| Invocations: 6M x $0.60 | $3.60 |
| Active CPU: 120 h x $0.128 | $15.36 |
| Provisioned memory: 4,000 GB-h x $0.0106 | $42.40 |
| Included usage | -$20.00 |
| Bill | about $152 |
Transfer is now the biggest line. Pro is postpaid, so the bill arrives after the month ends. Vercel’s spend management lets you set a budget that sends alerts or pauses projects when it is reached, and any commercial project should have one.
Seats add up separately. A team of four pays $80 a month in seats before any usage.
Where is Vercel good value?
Vercel is the best home for many Next.js frontends. It ships new framework features first, its edge network serves cached pages close to users, and per-branch preview deployments make review easy. A mostly static or well-cached site uses little function time, so it stays inside Pro’s allowances for a long time.
The bill grows with three things: server code that waits on slow upstreams (provisioned memory), heavy traffic past 1 TB, and more developer seats. A backend that runs all day, with workers and a database, fits a container platform better.
How does the same app price on Ownkube?
Ownkube runs the app as an always-on container and meters CPU and memory per minute, at about $18 per vCPU a month and $4.50 per GiB a month. Postgres sits on a flat database box next to the app, with storage at $0.25 per GB a month. Outbound traffic is $0.02 per GB in the Germany region and $0.13 per GB in the Mumbai region.
| Stack | Vercel Pro (1 seat) | Ownkube (Germany region) |
|---|---|---|
| Solo app: 300 GB transfer, plus a 5 GB Postgres | about $22, plus the database provider | about $18 |
| Busy month: 1.5 TB transfer, plus a 5 GB Postgres | about $152, plus the database provider | about $66 |
For the solo app, the Ownkube line is $6.75 of metered app usage (0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GiB), a $4 DB 0.5 box, $1.25 of storage and $6 of transfer. For the busy month, the app scales to 1 vCPU and 2 GiB ($27), the database moves to a $8 DB 1 box with $1.25 of storage, and 1.5 TB of transfer is $30.
The comparison has limits worth stating. Ownkube has no edge network or CDN in front of the app, and no per-branch preview deployments. Custom domains need Personal or Team. Traffic served from the Mumbai region bills at $0.13 per GB, so a transfer-heavy app there costs more than the table shows.
The billing direction is the other difference. Ownkube runs on a prepaid wallet with no seats. Pay as you go starts with a $5 top-up, Personal is $5 a month and loads $5 of credit, and Team is $20 a month and loads $20. Unused credit rolls over and never expires. When the balance runs out, apps pause with their data kept until you top up, so the most a busy month can cost is what you loaded.
FAQ
How much does Vercel cost per month?
$0 on Hobby for non-commercial projects. Commercial projects need Pro at $20 per developer seat a month, which includes $20 of usage. A solo app with modest traffic usually stays near $20 to $30 a month before a database, and traffic past 1 TB adds from $0.15 per GB.
Is Vercel free for commercial use?
No. Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use. A project that sells something or serves a business needs Pro. Is Vercel free? lists what Vercel counts as commercial.
What happens when you go over Vercel’s Hobby limits?
Hobby usage is capped and you cannot buy more. When a project reaches an allowance, you upgrade to Pro or wait for the monthly reset.
Why is my Vercel function bill so high?
Usually provisioned memory. It bills for the memory reserved while a function runs, including time spent waiting on a database or API. Lowering the function’s memory setting, caching responses, and moving slow work to a background worker all reduce it.
Does Vercel charge for bandwidth?
Yes, past the included amount. Hobby includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and Pro includes 1 TB, then it bills from $0.15 per GB depending on region.
Does Vercel include a database?
Vercel connects Postgres and other databases through Marketplace providers, each billed by that provider. See Vercel alternatives for platforms that run the database next to the app.
Where Ownkube fits
Keep the frontend on Vercel if it works there. Move the backend when functions start billing for time spent waiting, when you need a worker that runs for hours, or when you want the app and its Postgres on one bill. Ownkube runs the whole app in one place from a prepaid wallet, and Railway vs Vercel covers another way to split the stack. Deploy my first app.