Vercel alternative for a single site: what Pro costs
Most people who go looking for a Vercel alternative assume they've outgrown the free tier. Usually they haven't. Vercel Hobby is generous - 1 million edge requests and 100 GB of data transfer a month - but it is restricted to "non-commercial personal use only," and Vercel's definition of commercial is broad enough to catch a portfolio that lists your rates. The moment your site becomes commercial, the price goes from $0 to $20 a month, $240 a year, for one static site. That's the jump, and it isn't triggered by traffic.
So the real question isn't "what's cheaper than Vercel" but "does my site need anything Vercel does at request time?" If it's a folder of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, your options open up considerably. If it isn't, most of this won't help you, and I'll say so at the end.
The three things that actually push you off Hobby
1. Your site is commercial. Vercel's fair use guidelines define commercial usage as any deployment "used for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code" (checked August 2026). The examples:
- any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors
- advertising the sale of a product or service
- receiving payment to create, update, or host the site
- affiliate linking as the primary purpose of the site
- advertisements, including AdSense
- asking for donations - a footnote adds this explicitly
The second and third bullets do most of the damage. A landing page for a product you sell is commercial. A site a client paid you to build is commercial, even if the site itself never takes a penny. This is an eligibility rule, not a usage rule: a page with 40 visitors a month can be outside it.
2. Your repository lives in a GitHub organization. This one is buried in the limits page and surprises people mid-setup: "Vercel does not support connecting a project on your Hobby team to Git repositories owned by Git organizations." Not a soft limit, not a nag - the import flow won't complete. If you moved your repos under an org for tidiness, or a client added you to theirs, Hobby is off the table regardless of what the site does.
3. You want one other person to have access. Team collaboration features are simply absent from Hobby. There's no read-only tier there; the first collaborator means a team, and a team means Pro.
What $20 a month actually buys
The pricing page says "$20/user/month," which makes people assume every pair of eyes costs $20. The docs are more precise, and more favourable. Pro is a $20/month platform fee that includes one deploying seat and $20 of monthly usage credit. Extra Owner or Member seats - anyone who can configure or deploy - are $20/month each. Viewer seats are free and unlimited, and viewers can see deployments, analytics, and comment on previews. So a solo developer with three clients who want to look at previews pays $20, not $80.
Two things about that credit: it applies only after the included allowances are used up, and it expires at the end of the month. It is not a balance that rolls forward.
What isn't in the $20: Advanced Deployment Protection ($150/month), Preview Deployment Suffix ($100/month), Static IPs ($100/month per project), Speed Insights ($10/month per project), Web Analytics Plus ($10/month), SAML SSO ($300/month) - all checked August 2026. None of these matter for a one-site static deploy. I list them because "Pro is $20" is the floor, not the ceiling.
The meter nobody watches: edge requests
Bandwidth is the number everyone checks. Edge requests are the one that binds first, and almost nobody looks at it, because it doesn't map to anything intuitive.
Vercel's own docs are blunt: "Static assets and functions all incur CDN Requests," and CDN Requests are what your bill calls Edge Requests. Every JavaScript chunk, every font file, every image, every favicon - one request each. A typical Vite or Next build's homepage fires somewhere between 15 and 25 of them for a single page view. Fast Data Transfer is metered just as literally: it's "the full size of each HTTP request and response," including all headers and the full URL, not just the file bodies.
Run the arithmetic at 20 requests and 1.5 MB per page view:
| Hobby (free) | Pro ($20/mo) | |
|---|---|---|
| Edge requests included | 1,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Fast Data Transfer included | 100 GB | 1 TB |
| Page views before requests run out | ~50,000 | ~500,000 |
| Page views before transfer runs out | ~68,000 | ~700,000 |
Requests bind before bandwidth on both plans, which is why the bandwidth graph looks fine right up until service stops. Past the included allowance, Pro bills on demand at $2.00-$3.20 per million edge requests and $0.15-$0.35 per GB, priced by the region your visitors are in (checked August 2026). Washington D.C. is at the bottom of both ranges; São Paulo is $3.20 and $0.22.
Converted into something you can actually budget with, a static page view beyond the included allowance costs roughly:
- $0.26 per 1,000 page views served from
iad1(Washington D.C.) - $0.39 per 1,000 page views served from
gru1(São Paulo)
So a month where a post does well and adds 300,000 page views over your allowance adds roughly $78-$117 to a $20 bill. Not ruinous, but not $20 either - and by default the only thing standing between you and that invoice is a spend-management notification that Vercel sets at $200 per billing cycle for new customers. It notifies; it doesn't stop.
What "going over" means on Hobby
That asymmetry is the honest core of the free tier. On Pro, an overage is a bigger invoice. On Hobby, it's an outage. If the site matters, "free until it isn't" is a real risk to price in.
The static-site escape hatches
If your site is a build output and nothing more, three options cost less than $240 a year.
Cloudflare Pages. Free, and for a static site genuinely so: "requests to static assets are free and unlimited" on every plan, with 500 builds a month, 20,000 files and 100 custom domains per project on Free (checked August 2026). If you have no other constraint, this is the answer, and I'd rather you knew that than bought from me.
GitHub Pages. Free, with a 1 GB published-site limit and a soft 100 GB/month bandwidth limit. Fine for docs and small sites.
Hosting you already pay for. If you're running a WordPress site for a blog, a shop, or a client, that server is already serving files - every image in wp-content/uploads proves it. Parkstatic is the plugin and GitHub Action I built for that case: it builds your repo in GitHub Actions, pre-renders every route to HTML, and publishes the output onto the WordPress hosting that's already on your credit card, with version history and one-click rollback. $29.99 a year, or $89.99 once, per site (checked August 2026). The deploy guide for v0 projects covers the Next.js-specific setup, since that's where most people arrive from Vercel.
The comparison across all the hosts, including the ones I don't compete with, is on the alternatives hub, and where to host your static site is the general-case version of this decision. If Netlify is the other name on your shortlist, its meter works nothing like this one - Netlify prices deploys and credits rather than requests, and its paid tier includes unlimited members against Vercel's per-deploying-seat model.
Stay on Vercel if…
Anything happens at request time
Server Actions, Route Handlers that read the request, ISR, proxy.ts, auth, A/B tests, image optimization on the fly. I ship files. No configuration makes a file run code.
Your audience is global
Vercel's CDN answers from a region near your visitor. A shared WordPress host is one origin in one datacentre, plus whatever CDN you put in front of it yourself. For a worldwide audience that difference is measurable, and it's the strongest thing Vercel has that I can't match.
You're on Hobby legitimately
A personal site, no payments, no ads, no client paying you - Hobby is free and excellent. Don't add a build pipeline to save nothing.
You need the platform, not the hosting
WAF rules, DDoS Attack Mode, log drains, RBAC, an audit trail. Those are products, and $20 for them is cheap.
And if you need preview deployments per pull request. I have none, and for a team of more than one that's a real downgrade, not a rounding error. One caveat if you keep them: Vercel sets X-Robots-Tag: noindex on preview deployments automatically, but the KB notes that "if you're using a custom domain that is assigned to a non-Production branch, the header will not be set." That's how staging sites end up in Google.
If, on the other hand, your site is static, counts as commercial by Vercel's definition, and you already pay a WordPress host for something else, you're choosing between $240 a year and $29.99. The full case for serving a static build from WordPress hosting is the longer version of that argument - and if it fits, Parkstatic's pricing is one line item, not a meter.