Vercel
The default home for Next.js, with a polished DX and a love-it-or-hate-it bill.
Vercel is the gold standard for "I push to GitHub and the site is live in 30 seconds." If you're shipping a Next.js app, the free Hobby tier is unbeatable for personal sites and prototypes. The Pro plan ($20/month/seat) is fine if you charge real money for what you ship.
The risk story is the bill. Vercel's pricing on bandwidth, function GB-hours, and image optimisations can produce surprising overages on sites that go viral or attract bot traffic. If your project might suddenly serve 10× normal traffic, set spend caps before launch and have a fallback plan (Cloudflare in front, or a static export to a cheaper host).
Pros & cons
- + Push to GitHub, get a preview URL — no other host has tightened this loop further
- + Image optimisation, ISR, edge functions all wired in by default
- + Generous free tier covers solo side projects
- + Created by the Next.js team, so Next.js features land here first
- − Bandwidth and function execution beyond the free tier scale aggressively
- − Pro plan starts at $20/seat/month — expensive for a solo dev
- − Long-running functions are not the platform's strength (15-min cap, costly)
- − Migrations away after lock-in are non-trivial if you've leaned on Next.js-only features
Plans & pricing
| Plan | Price | CPU | RAM | Disk | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby 100 GB bandwidth, no commercial use | Free | — | 0 GB | — GB | 100 GB |
| Pro per seat; commercial use | $20/mo | — | 0 GB | — GB | 1 TB |
Free tier: Hobby plan: 100 GB bandwidth, 100 GB-h serverless, no commercial use
Features at a glance
Vercel head-to-head
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