Vercel 2026 Pricing: Hidden Costs That Can Surprise Next.js Teams

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Vercel offers three tiers — Hobby (free), Pro ($20/seat/month), and Enterprise — but the actual bill for a Next.js project depends heavily on usage meters that are not immediately visible at signup. The Hobby plan explicitly prohibits commercial use, meaning any revenue-generating or client-facing project must start on Pro from day one. For a freelance setup with a developer and client on the dashboard, seat costs alone reach $40/month before any traffic is served. Three usage meters most often catch teams off guard: serverless function execution (billed in GB-hours), image optimisation requests (5,000 included, then $5 per 1,000), and bandwidth (1 TB included on Pro). Teams are advised to model these costs against expected traffic before launch, and to use CDN caching or external image services to avoid unexpected overages.

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