Vercel's free plan doesn't allow commercial use, and going legitimate there costs $20 a seat. This is the $7 middle: 150 GB of fast global CDN, real server-side compute that sleeps when nobody's visiting and wakes in 4–36 ms, and a hard spend cap so the bill can't surprise you.
Card required — the $7 is the trial. Cancel in one click, no retention maze.
* Vercel list pricing, cheapest region. Their free tier has no usage billing — you hit limits instead. Verify against their current published plans; the calculator tells you when they're cheaper, too.
Nobody visiting? Your app sleeps and bills nothing. The next request wakes it in 4–36 ms — no cold-start tax, on the cheapest plan we sell.
Your worst-case bill is a number you set — $20/mo by default. We stop before it, not after. No surprise invoice, ever.
SSR, API routes, ISR and server actions run in a Firecracker microVM with 2 GB and a full vCPU — not a stripped-down edge sandbox.
Static assets and cached pages served from a global edge network. 150 GB of US/EU traffic is included in the $7.
Attach up to 5 custom domains. Certificates are issued and renewed for you. Commercial use is allowed — that is the whole point.
Every branch gets its own stable preview URL. No injected toolbar, no badge on the page — safe to send straight to a client.
The no-cold-start claim is measurable, so we published it: put an app to sleep and wake it yourself →
The most you can be billed in a month. Usage past the $7 credit is metered at $0.0053/GB-hr and $0.064/CPU-hr, and we stop at the cap — before it, not after. Only you can raise it.
Your Next.js app and the Go or Python API behind it are two projects in the same list, metered on the same rates, capped by the same number, on one invoice. No second vendor for the backend, no second bill to reconcile.
Frontends and backends side by side. Deploy from a repo or a Docker image; the frontend reaches its API by URL from its environment variables.
Memory at $0.0053/GB-hr and active CPU at $0.064/hr, whether the process is Node or Go. Both sleep when idle and bill nothing asleep.
The $20 spend cap covers everything on the account. Add a managed Postgres and it meters on the same invoice.
Computed from the published rates. Two apps, a quiet month: the usage credit absorbs it.
Zero-config builds via framework detection. Next.js is what we test hardest — a corpus of a few hundred apps runs against every change.
Any language that listens on a port. The detector picks the build for the frameworks below; anything else ships as a Docker image.
Also detected: Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, Vite, Create React App, Fastify, Gin, Echo, Fiber, Axum, Actix, Rocket, Symfony, Sinatra, Ktor, Quarkus, Vapor...
Easier to read this now than to discover it after you've migrated. If any row is a dealbreaker, we'd rather you knew today.