Why pay $7
when free tiers exist?
Fair question, and for a lot of people the answer is that you shouldn't. Here is every alternative we know of, what it actually costs, and the cases where it beats us. We would rather lose the ones we deserve to lose than argue with your spreadsheet later.
If your project isn't making money yet, stay on the free tier.
Genuinely. Vercel's Hobby plan gives you 100 GB and custom domains for nothing, Cloudflare's free plan is extraordinary value, and neither of them wants your $7 yet either. Come back the day your side project takes its first payment — because that is the day Vercel's terms stop allowing it, and the day this page starts being useful.
What $0 actually costs
Free tiers are not charity, they are a funnel, and each one collects its fee somewhere other than your card. Knowing where is the whole decision.
A ceiling. Free tiers have no bill, and paid tiers mostly have no maximum — which is why "I woke up to a $4,000 invoice" is a genre of forum post. Every account here has a hard spend cap, $20 by default, and we stop serving before we exceed it. Your worst case is a number you chose, printed on the pricing page.
The paid alternatives, and where each one wins
Everyone's pricing page compares against Vercel. Here is the rest of the field, with their own published numbers, and a straight answer on when to pick them instead.
Cloudflare Workers / Pages
- Paid
- $5/mo paid plan — 10M requests and 30M CPU-ms included, then $0.30/M requests and $0.02/M CPU-ms
- Free
- 100,000 requests/day, 10 ms of CPU per invocation
This is the best free tier in the industry and we will not pretend otherwise. Commercial use is allowed on it, and they charge nothing for bandwidth — no egress fees at any volume. If your app fits the Workers runtime, their free plan is very hard to beat and their paid plan is $5.
Workers is not Node. You get a V8 isolate with a CPU budget per invocation, so long tasks, native modules and anything that expects a real filesystem or a long-lived process need reworking, and Next.js needs an adapter. Here your app runs as an ordinary Node process in a microVM with 2 GB and a full vCPU — the same code that runs on your laptop, no compatibility layer, no per-invocation CPU ceiling.
Caveat: Their request/CPU-ms meters and our memory/CPU-hour meters are not the same shape, so there is no honest single ratio between the two. Compare on the app you actually have.
Netlify
- Paid
- Personal $9/mo · Pro $20/mo
- Free
- $0 forever — and it now carries their own managed Postgres ("Netlify Database") and firewall rules
For a static site or a Jamstack build with light functions, their free tier is genuinely enough, and their build and deploy tooling is mature. If you are not running server-side rendering, you may never need to pay anyone.
Once the app is meaningfully dynamic, you are on Personal or Pro and paying for functions and bandwidth on top. We are $7 with server-side rendering as the default rather than the add-on, and our bandwidth is priced at what it costs us to serve rather than bundled into credits.
Railway
- Paid
- Hobby $5/mo · Pro $20/mo · metered per second at their published $10 per GB-month of memory, $20 per vCPU-month, and $0.05/GB egress
- Free
- $0 with $1/month of credit — enough to try, not to run anything. Their free trial is a separate $5 one-time credit over 30 days
Their published CPU rate is lower than ours per unit, they will run any container rather than just web frameworks, and databases and workers sit in the same project. For a container that is genuinely busy around the clock, or a stack that is more backend than frontend, Railway is the better tool.
We are cheaper on the two meters a web app actually consumes. Memory: ours is $0.0053/GB-hr; theirs is published as $10 per GB-month, which is about $0.0137 an hour — our arithmetic on their number, not a rate they print, so check it. US/EU bandwidth: $0.02/GB against their $0.05. And we sleep your app when nobody is visiting — an idle app bills nothing here and wakes in milliseconds, which is where most of the difference on a side project comes from.
Caveat: Their vCPU-hour and our active-CPU-hour are different meters: ours only runs while your code is executing, so a per-unit rate comparison on CPU flatters us and a busy always-on service can land cheaper on theirs. Run your own numbers.
Render
- Paid
- Their compute-plan docs list the smallest paid web service at 0.5 CPU / 512 MB and send you elsewhere for the price, so we are not quoting one
- Free
- Free web services, which "spin down" after 15 minutes without inbound traffic
Mature managed Postgres and Redis alongside your app, background workers and cron as first-class objects, and a free tier you can genuinely ship a hobby project on if you can live with the spin-down.
Their free tier sleeps and then cold-boots, which is the exact experience we built the platform to avoid. Their own docs put the wake at "about one minute"; ours is milliseconds, and the wake demo lets you time it yourself. Their smallest paid web service is 0.5 CPU and 512 MB; the $7 here is 2 GB and a full vCPU while awake, plus a CDN allowance and $7 of usage credit.
The option most pricing pages pretend doesn't exist
A VPS you run yourself (Coolify, Dokku, Docker Compose)
A few euros a month for a small shared-vCPU box with a large traffic allowance
We used to print a euro range here. It was last checked in July, cloud prices moved more than once during 2026, and a number we cannot stand behind today is worth less than no number at all — so read the host's own page rather than ours.
This genuinely costs less than $7 and gives you far more raw CPU, RAM and bandwidth for the money. Coolify is good software, it does git-push deploys, and if you enjoy running your own infrastructure you should do this instead. We mean that.
What $7 buys is not compute — you can rent more compute for less. It is not thinking about kernel updates, certificate renewal, build caching, log rotation, or the disk filling at 3am on a Sunday. Call it an hour a month of your attention. If your time is worth less than $7 an hour, the VPS wins on arithmetic and you should take it.
Three reasons, and they're narrow on purpose
Your app is allowed to make money here. On the free tier you are most likely migrating from, it is not.
Idle apps sleep and bill nothing, then wake in 4–36 ms. Free tiers either sleep and cold-boot, or charge you to stay awake.
$20 unless you raise it. Usage pricing without a ceiling is the thing everyone is actually afraid of.
Note what is not on that list: raw price. Cloudflare's free plan and a small VPS both beat $7, and we are not going to argue otherwise. Against Vercel Pro specifically the money does matter — same compute meters, memory and active CPU each at half their Washington D.C. rate, US/EU bandwidth at $0.02 against the $0.15 that is the cheapest per-GB figure they publish — and the calculator will show you the line-by-line, including when they come out ahead.
Still here? Then it's probably earning.
Move one app, keep the rest wherever they are. Ten minutes, and worst case you cancel and you are out $7.
Competitor prices and free-tier limits above were taken from each provider's own pricing pages and verified on 25 September 2026. They change; if you find one out of date, tell us and we will fix it.