Hosting and databases

Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages: free tiers, pricing and limits for small teams

Stack Founder HQ · Updated 18 October 2026 · Hosting and databases · How we write

Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages all deploy a website from a Git repository, serve it from a global network and run server-side functions. For a small static site, any of them works well and may cost nothing. The differences appear when you need commercial use on a free plan, a lot of bandwidth, or heavy use of server-side functions.

*Prices and limits were checked on 18 October 2026 on vercel.com/pricing, netlify.com/pricing, pages.cloudflare.com and Cloudflare's Pages limits and Workers pricing documentation. Prices are in US dollars and exclude VAT.*

Free plans at a glance

	Vercel Hobby	Netlify Free	Cloudflare Pages Free
Commercial use	No. Vercel describes Hobby as for personal, non-commercial use	Allowed	Allowed
Bandwidth	100 GB fast data transfer	Counted in credits (300 credits a month in total)	Unlimited
Requests	1 million CDN requests	Counted in credits	Unlimited static requests
Functions	1 million function invocations	Counted in credits	Workers Free plan: 100,000 requests a day
Builds	Included	A production deploy costs 15 credits	500 builds a month, 1 at a time

Vercel

Hobby is free but, according to Vercel's pricing page, intended for personal, non-commercial projects. If your site is for a business, including a SaaS product's marketing site, plan on Pro.

Pro costs $20 a month per developer seat and includes:

1 TB of fast data transfer, then from $0.15 per GB
10 million edge requests
$20 of included usage credit
a default on-demand budget of $200, which you can adjust

Vercel's strength is its close integration with Next.js, which Vercel develops, along with preview deployments for every pull request and a polished dashboard. The trade-off is that usage beyond the included amounts is billed across many separate metrics. If you have a busy site, read the usage page regularly and set the spend controls.

Netlify

Netlify now prices its plans in credits, which cover deploys, bandwidth, compute and requests:

Plan	Price	Credits per month
Free	$0	300 credit limit
Personal	$9 a month	1,000
Pro	$20 a month, unlimited members	3,000

According to Netlify, a production deploy costs 15 credits, bandwidth 20 credits per GB, compute 10 credits per GB-hour, and web requests 2 credits per 10,000. On Pro, extra credit packs cost $10 per 1,500 credits.

This makes Netlify easy to understand for small sites, but you need to do the maths. On the Free plan, for example, 300 credits would be used up by 20 production deploys (20 × 15 = 300) before counting any bandwidth. Frequent deploys and heavy traffic both use credits, so estimate both before choosing a plan.

Pro's unlimited team members can make it cheaper than per-seat pricing for teams of several people.

Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare's Pages site says that all plans include unlimited sites, seats, requests and bandwidth for static content. The free plan's limits are about builds and files rather than traffic. Cloudflare's documentation lists:

500 builds a month, with one build running at a time
20,000 files per site, with a maximum file size of 25 MiB
100 custom domains per project, and up to 100 projects

Server-side code runs as Pages Functions, which Cloudflare bills as Workers requests. On the Workers Free plan, accounts get 100,000 requests a day, resetting at midnight UTC. The Workers Paid plan has a minimum charge of $5 a month per account, including 10 million requests a month, then $0.30 per additional million. Cloudflare says there are no extra charges for data transfer.

The trade-off is the developer experience. Pages works well for static sites and frameworks with Cloudflare adapters. However, functions run on Cloudflare's own Workers runtime rather than standard Node.js, so some Node libraries need compatibility settings or alternatives. Check that your framework and dependencies support it before you commit.

Costs for three typical projects

These examples use only the published prices above.

A static marketing site for a business, with 200 GB of traffic a month and a few deploys a week.

Vercel: not allowed on Hobby, so Pro at $20 a month for one seat (200 GB is within the 1 TB included).
Netlify: 200 GB at 20 credits per GB is 4,000 credits, more than Pro's 3,000. Expect extra credit packs on top of $20.
Cloudflare Pages: $0, with unlimited bandwidth on the free plan.

A Next.js app with server rendering and a team of three developers.

Vercel: three Pro seats at $20 is $60 a month, plus any usage beyond the included amounts.
Netlify: Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members, plus credits for compute and bandwidth.
Cloudflare: Workers Paid at $5 a month for 10 million requests, if your app runs on the Workers runtime.

A personal hobby site. All three free plans work, and Vercel Hobby is allowed here because the site is non-commercial.

Which to choose

Vercel if you build with Next.js and want the smoothest experience, and per-seat pricing is acceptable.
Netlify if you want a flat price for a team and your traffic and deploy volumes fit comfortably within the credits.
Cloudflare Pages if bandwidth is your main cost, you want commercial use without paying, or you already use Cloudflare for DNS. Make sure your server-side code runs on Workers.

Whichever you pick, set spend limits or alerts where the platform offers them, and check the usage page after your first busy month.