Netlify free tier: 300 credits per month

Netlify’s Free plan is “$0 forever” with a limit of 300 credits per month. The limit is hard: there is no auto-recharge and no overage billing, and when you hit it, sites pause until the next monthly cycle. Whether a card is required to start is not stated on the current official pages; what the docs do say is that you will never be charged for the Free plan. Checked against the official pricing page and the credit-based billing docs on 2026-09-02.

Correction: the old quotas are historical

Most writeups about the Netlify free tier still quote 100 GB of bandwidth, 300 build minutes, and 125,000 function invocations per month. That wording is historical. Netlify moved to credit-based plans on 2025-09-04, and as of 2026-09-02 the current free allowance is 300 credits per month, with usage types metered against that single pool. If you are comparing free tiers using the old bandwidth numbers, you are comparing against a plan that no longer exists for these purposes. The same dating applies to the card question: the widely quoted “no credit card required” line comes from the launch-era blog post about the pre-2025 Legacy Free plan, and the current pricing page and billing docs state nothing about cards either way, so this entry now records the requirement as not stated.

How the 300 credits behave

Credits are a monthly allowance, not a balance you accumulate: the docs describe a monthly limit, sites pausing at the limit, and no auto-recharge. The nastiest detail is account-wide blast radius: one project exceeding the limit pauses all projects on the account. A forgotten demo site with a traffic spike can take down your active projects for the rest of the cycle.

What this plan is now

Netlify’s free plan today is closer in spirit to a metered wallet than the quota checklists of Vercel’s Hobby plan or the daily request counts of Cloudflare Workers Free. Whether 300 credits covers your site depends on how your usage maps to credits, and that mapping lives in the credit-based billing docs linked below.

Choose or skip

Choose Netlify Free if you want $0 card-free hosting for personal frontends and can accept a hard stop at the limit. Skip it if you run several projects on one account and cannot afford one of them pausing the rest.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

For alternatives with different limit behavior, see the Render free tier, or read how to choose compute. Every grant I track is on the credits index.