Netlify vs Vercel pricing at small scale

At the scale most of my client sites run at, both free tiers are genuinely enough, and the pricing conversation only starts mattering once you’re running more than a handful of projects on one account, or one project gets real traffic. That’s the point where reading the pricing page carefully actually pays off, because both platforms structure their limits differently and a project that’s fine on one can hit a wall on the other.

Vercel’s free tier is scoped for personal, non-commercial use per their terms, which is a detail people gloss over — if you’re deploying client work, technically you’re supposed to be on a paid team plan even if you’re nowhere near the usage limits. Netlify’s free tier doesn’t carry that same commercial-use restriction, which matters if you’re running several small client sites on one account and want to stay compliant without paying for a team plan you don’t otherwise need.

Where it flips is bandwidth overage pricing once you do need a paid plan. Netlify’s per-GB overage cost has historically run higher than Vercel’s, so a project with unpredictable traffic spikes — a client running a promotion, something that gets shared unexpectedly — can rack up a bigger bill on Netlify if you’re not watching it. Vercel’s function invocation pricing on server-rendered routes is the mirror image: if you’ve got a lot of API routes or SSR pages getting hit, that adds up faster on Vercel than Netlify’s equivalent.

Build minutes are the other one worth checking against your actual workflow rather than assuming. If you’re pushing small commits frequently across several projects, or running a CI setup that triggers extra builds, both platforms’ free-tier build minute allowances get eaten faster than you’d expect, and it’s worth checking your actual usage in the dashboard before assuming you’re fine.

My practical read at small scale: for a handful of client static sites with light traffic, either works and the difference is rounding error. Once one project starts generating real, unpredictable traffic, or you’re running enough server-rendered routes that function invocations start showing up as a line item, go read both current pricing pages against your actual usage numbers rather than trusting a comparison written months ago — both platforms have changed their tiers more than once in the time I’ve been watching them.