Glossary

Plain-English definitions for the words privacy tools throw at you.

Build Minutes

Total minutes per month a host will run your build pipeline before throttling. The most common free-tier ceiling.

Bandwidth

Total data transferred from the host to visitors per month. The metric most often advertised but rarely the binding constraint.

Edge Function

Serverless code running at the CDN edge , close to users , usually with V8 isolate runtime instead of Node.

Cold Start

Latency added when a serverless function or container starts from scratch on first request after idle.

Egress

Data leaving a service. Most cloud providers charge for egress; ingress (data coming in) is usually free.

Spin-Down

When a free tier container or web service is paused after inactivity. The next request waits for spin-up.

Static Export

Pre-rendering an entire app to plain HTML/CSS/JS at build time so any static host can serve it without a runtime.