Vercel vs Netlify: Free Tier Comparison for 2026

Vercel and Netlify both offer 100 GB bandwidth on their free tiers. That part is the same. Past that line, the differences are bigger than people think , and one of them probably disqualifies one of these hosts for your project today.

The headline numbers

Vercel Hobby: 100 GB bandwidth, 6,000 build minutes per month, 100 GB-hours of serverless function compute, unlimited static deployments. Netlify Starter: 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes per month, 125,000 function invocations, 100 GB-hours of edge function execution.

Vercel ships 20x the build minutes. Netlify ships 25% more function invocations counted differently. Both are real ceilings, not soft caps , when you hit them, your deploy queues or your function returns 429.

The rule that decides

Vercel Hobby explicitly forbids commercial use. That includes ads, paid SaaS, and agency client sites. Netlify Starter has no such restriction. If you are running a side project that earns a dollar (AdSense, affiliate, paid plan), Vercel will eventually email you and ask you to upgrade to Pro at $20 per month. Netlify will not.

This is not a rumor. It is in Vercel's terms of service. Plenty of indie hackers run profitable sites on Vercel Hobby for years before getting flagged, but the policy is clear and Vercel does enforce it on larger or more visible sites.

Build minutes are the real difference for active projects

300 minutes a month sounds like a lot until you realize a Next.js app with sharp image optimization can take 4-6 minutes per deploy. That is 50-75 deploys per month. If you commit a fix on Friday afternoon and push three times to chase a regression, you have just used 18 minutes. Add preview deploys for every PR and you hit 300 in two weeks.

Vercel's 6,000 minutes basically means you never think about build minutes on a Hobby site. That is genuinely a different experience.

Function execution: the third dimension

Both hosts now bill function compute by GB-hours. Vercel gives 100 GB-hours of serverless. Netlify gives 100 GB-hours of edge functions. They sound similar; they behave very differently.

Edge functions on Netlify run on Deno on a cold edge , fast TTFB, limited Node API surface. Serverless on Vercel runs on Node Lambdas , full Node compatibility, slower cold start. If your code uses native Node modules (Sharp, Puppeteer, anything binary), Vercel is the easier path. If you write web-standard code (fetch, Web Streams), Netlify edge wins on latency.

Verdict

Pick Netlify if your site earns money or might. Pick Vercel if it is purely personal, runs Next.js, and you want the polished DX. The 100 GB bandwidth is a wash, the build minutes favor Vercel, and the commercial-use clause is the line that actually matters in 2026.