Vercel Hobby plan and commercial use: what counts, and where else to host
Short answer, read from Vercel's own pages on 2026-10-13: a site that takes payment, runs ads, or exists to sell something does not belong on the Hobby plan. Vercel's fair use guidelines say: "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan" [1]. This page lists what the guidelines name as commercial, what the Pro plan costs, and what three other static hosts say on the same question. Every figure has a source number and the date it was read.
What Vercel counts as commercial
The guidelines define commercial usage as "any Deployment that is 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" [1]. Their examples, quoted in short:
- Any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors of the site.
- 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.
- The inclusion of advertisements, including online advertising platforms like Google AdSense.
The same page says asking for donations "does not fall under commercial usage", and that if you are unsure you should contact Vercel support [1]. Two cases catch people out: a client site you built and hosted for pay (the third bullet), and a company's marketing page that links to a paid product. We did not find a rule on either beyond the wording above, so treat both as likely commercial and ask Vercel if it matters.
What moving to Pro costs
Vercel's Pro plan documentation lists a platform fee of $20/month, with 1 deploying team seat included and $20/month in usage credit [2]. Extra deploying seats and usage past the credit are billed on top, so a one-person site with light traffic is about $20/month before tax, and a team costs more. We did not price your traffic; the pricing page is where to check bandwidth and function use.
What other static hosts say (read 2026-10-13)
PASS means the page we read allows the use. UNKNOWN means we did not find the answer on the page named, so you need to read the provider's terms before you rely on it.
| Host and plan | Commercial or business use | What the page says | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Hobby | FAIL | Non-commercial personal use only | [1] |
| Vercel Pro | PASS | Commercial usage requires Pro or Enterprise; Pro is $20/month platform fee | [1] [2] |
| GitHub Pages | FAIL for a business or shop | "not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)" | [3] |
| Cloudflare Pages Free | UNKNOWN | The limits page names no commercial restriction, but we did not read Cloudflare's service terms. It lists 500 builds a month on Free, and says "requests to static assets are free and unlimited" | [4] [5] |
| Netlify Free | UNKNOWN | The pricing page shows Free at $0 with a 300 credit limit a month, Personal at $9/month and Pro at $20/month. It does not state a commercial rule, and we did not read Netlify's terms | [6] |
Read the table like this: only two rows are settled in writing for a paid site (Vercel Pro passes, GitHub Pages fails). The other rows are not a green light. If you pick one, open its terms of service and search for "commercial" before you move anything.
How to decide in ten minutes
- Write your must-haves as pass or fail lines, for example "takes card payments", "needs server functions", "budget at most $10/month", "must not be locked to one framework". Put the hard ones first.
- Delete any host whose written terms fail a hard line. Vercel Hobby and GitHub Pages already fail the first one for a paid site.
- For the hosts left, mark each line Yes, Partly, No or Not checked. Not checked is not a pass.
- Count what moving costs you: build settings, environment variables, redirects, custom domain and DNS changes, and any framework features that only work on one host.
- Include staying put and paying $20/month as a candidate. At small scale it is often the cheapest in hours.
The free replacement scorecard does steps 1 to 3 in your browser and shows which unchecked cells could still change the winner. For a worked example of the full method with a source on every cell, read the CI sample brief. If you would rather have it done for your site and your list, the Switch Brief is $39 and delivered within 24 hours. It is AI-written research from public pages, not legal advice.
Limits of this page
This is a reading of public pages on one day, not legal advice and not a ruling on your site. Providers change terms; check the dates. We did not run or deploy anything, and we do not know your traffic. If a figure here is out of date, the source link is where to confirm it.
Sources (fetched 2026-10-13)
- https://vercel.com/docs/limits/fair-use-guidelines
- https://vercel.com/docs/plans/pro-plan
- https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/github-pages-limits
- https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits/
- https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/pricing/
- https://www.netlify.com/pricing/