Hosting & Deployment · decision tool
What Vercel really costs at your traffic
Vercel priced at YOUR bandwidth, requests and seats — next to every alternative, so you see exactly what the DX premium costs this month.
Prices verified 2026-07-15 against official pricing pages · fit weights are our estimates (see methodology) · share the URL to share your configuration
As of Jul 2026, with 500GB bandwidth/month, 5 millions requests / month, 1 GB server ram needed, a $50 budget for this slot, Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) ranks first for these inputs at 92% fit and a StackSays-estimated $5.00/month (Vercel: 92% fit, $20.00/month). Fit weights are our estimates; prices trace to official pages. Change any input below and the verdict recomputes.
Your situation
The verdict updates as you move these.
Toss-up — your priorities decide, not the tools
Free unlimited bandwidth, $5 flat for serious usage — the cost-structure outlier
vs Vercel: fit 92% against 92%, est $5.00 against $20.00 per month — genuinely close; read both risk lists below
The decision, in plain words
For a solo builder at 500GB bandwidth/month and a $50.00/mo budget for the hosting platform slot, Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) leads at 92% fit and $5.00/mo. The two rules doing the work: budget fit (~$5/mo is 10% of your $50/mo budget); batteries included (Bundles preview deploys, zero-ops (managed), global edge — fewer services to glue at team size 1).
Vercel is a genuine coin-flip here (92% fit, $20.00/mo) — read both risk lists and pick the failure mode you prefer.
Honest weak spot of the pick: framework/runtime-coupled platform — leaving means re-architecting build and functions.
Generated from the calculation above — every number traces to the sourced data; nothing here is written by an AI making things up.
Why Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) scores 92%
How the $5.00/mo estimate is calculated
What could change this verdict
Cost risk
Official prices verified 2026-07-15; calculation is deterministic code over those prices.
At a glance
| Tool | Free tier | Paid entry | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | 100GB fast data transfer, 1M invocations, 1 seat | Pro $20/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) | 100K Worker requests/day (~3M/mo), unlimited static requests and bandwidth | Workers Standard $5/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Netlify | 300 credits/month ≈ 15GB bandwidth equivalent | Pro $20/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Railway | No free tier | Hobby $5/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Render | 512MB / 0.1 CPU, 100GB bandwidth | Starter $7/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Fly.io | No free tier | Pay-as-you-go — shared-cpu-1x 256MB ≈ $2.02/mo → ~$8.08/GB-mo RAM equivalent (machine sizes are granular); NA egress $0.02/GB. Free allowances ended for new accounts Oct 2024 | 2026-07-15 |
| Hetzner Cloud (VPS + Coolify) | No free tier | CX22 VPS $4.99/mo | 2026-07-15 |
Data sources
| Tool | Source | Verified |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Vercel pricing page | 2026-07-15 |
| Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) | Cloudflare Workers pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Netlify | Netlify pricing page | 2026-07-15 |
| Railway | Railway pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Render | Render pricing (via 2026 third-party verification; official page JS-blocked to our monitor) | 2026-07-15 |
| Fly.io | Fly.io pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Hetzner Cloud (VPS + Coolify) | Hetzner Cloud (pricing via 2026 trackers; EUR list price) | 2026-07-15 |
A monitor re-checks these pages for changes; when a vendor moves a price, the date updates and every verdict recomputes.
People also ask
Is Vercel free?
The Hobby tier is free — 100GB bandwidth, 1M invocations, 1 seat (verified 2026-07-15) — but Vercel's terms limit it to personal, non-commercial projects. A revenue-generating app technically needs Pro at $20/seat, which is the number this page's calculator starts from.
Does Cloudflare charge for bandwidth?
No — egress is free at any scale on Workers and Pages (verified 2026-07-15 from official docs). That makes Cloudflare the cost-structure outlier: the same 2TB/month that costs ~$170 on Vercel Pro costs $5 flat on Workers Standard.