Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages: where the hosting bill explodes (2026)

All three of these look basically identical from the free tier — a generous allotment, a paid plan hovering near $20, nothing alarming. The bill only tells the real story once a project gets popular, and that's exactly when switching hosts becomes the most painful.

| Platform | Free tier | Paid tier | Bandwidth overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | 100 GB bandwidth, 6,000 build-min | Pro — $20/user/mo, 1 TB | $0.15/GB |
| Netlify | 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build-min | Pro — $19/user/mo, 1 TB, unlimited members | metered |
| Cloudflare Pages | unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo | Workers Paid — $5/mo, 5,000 builds | none |

Cloudflare's number in that last column isn't a typo. Pages has unlimited bandwidth on every tier, including free — the one genuinely hard thing to make expensive here is a static site, because the meter that usually runs up a bill simply doesn't exist. Costs only show up if you lean heavily on Workers compute or its KV/D1 storage, which is a different kind of spending entirely.

Vercel is the one where growth actually hurts. It bills per seat *and* charges $0.15/GB once you're past the included 1 TB — add a few teammates and a traffic spike in the same quarter and both dials turn against you at once. Netlify sidesteps half of that problem: its Pro plan includes unlimited team members at a flat per-workspace rate, so adding people doesn't move the bill the way it does on Vercel. What eats into Netlify's number instead is build minutes and its growing list of paid add-ons.

The trend this year, if there is one, is that Vercel and Netlify both leaned further into credit-style billing for compute and AI features — another meter alongside the ones that already exist. Cloudflare didn't follow; "bandwidth is free" has stayed exactly that, and it's still the strongest cost argument in the category for anything content-heavy.

For a static or lightly dynamic site, Cloudflare Pages is cheaper by enough of a margin that it's barely a contest, and the free tier alone covers most personal and small-business projects without ever reaching for a card. Vercel earns its premium specifically for Next.js teams who want the tightest framework integration and are willing to pay per seat and per gigabyte for it — just do that math before committing a growing team to it, not after the first surprising invoice.