Vercel free tier: $0 per month Hobby plan

Vercel’s Hobby plan costs $0 per month and is restricted to non-commercial personal use. It is a recurring free tier, not a credit: Hobby has no billing cycles, and when you exceed a quota the affected feature pauses rather than billing you. The pricing pages do not state a card requirement for Hobby; a card comes in when you upgrade to Pro. Checked against the official pricing, Sandbox pricing, and Hobby docs on 2026-08-24.

The Sandbox allowances

Vercel Sandbox runs untrusted and AI-generated code, and Hobby includes real monthly allowances for it: 5 hours of active CPU, 420 GB-hours of provisioned memory, 5,000 sandbox creations, and 20 GB of data transfer per month, plus 15 GB of lifetime snapshot storage. Concurrency tops out at 10 sandboxes, sessions at 45 minutes, and a single sandbox at 4 vCPUs with 8 GB of memory. Exceeding the quotas pauses sandbox creation until 30 days after first use. If you outgrow that, the E2B Hobby credit is the adjacent sandbox offer with a $100 one-time balance.

No GPU in the Sandbox

Worth stating because sandboxes and GPUs increasingly travel together: Vercel’s Sandbox pricing lists no GPU SKU as of 2026-08-24. For a sandbox platform that does sell GPUs, see the Daytona $200 credit, where the free credit notably excludes them.

Platform quotas beyond Sandbox

Hobby’s general platform quotas are separate from the Sandbox numbers: 1 million function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of Fluid compute, and up to 200 projects, per the Hobby docs.

The Pro trial is a different offer

Vercel also runs a 14-day Pro trial with $20 of credits. That is a time-boxed trial of the paid plan, not part of Hobby, so do not read the $20 as a signup grant for free users.

Choose or skip

Choose Hobby if your project is personal and non-commercial and fits the monthly quotas. Skip it if the work is commercial, since the plan terms exclude that use.

Where the non-commercial line sits on Hobby

The fair use guidelines draw the line more precisely than the usual “personal projects only” summary. The definition: “Commercial usage is defined as any Deployment that is used for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code.” The page lists examples that count as commercial: requesting or processing payment from visitors, advertising the sale of a product or service, and receiving payment to create, update, or host the site. Sites whose primary purpose is affiliate linking count too, as does including advertisements, Google AdSense named among them. One carve-out is explicit: “Asking for Donations does not fall under commercial usage.”

Note the breadth: “anyone involved in any part of the production” means a site can be commercial because the developer was paid, even if the site itself never charges a visitor. On consequences, the guidelines say commercial usage “requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan”; they do not spell out an enforcement sequence for the commercial rule itself. The documented pause behavior on Hobby is tied to exceeding usage quotas, not to commercial use.

What I have done with it

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

For neighboring serverless free tiers, see Cloudflare Workers and Netlify, or read how to choose compute. Every grant I track is on the credits index.