Vercel Free Tier for Students: What It Really Covers

I run four production sites on Vercel's free tier. Real domains, real traffic, real clients looking at them. Cost so far: nothing.

That is the honest headline. Here is the equally honest small print, because the limits that matter are not the ones on the pricing page.

What you get, plainly

The Hobby tier covers static hosting, serverless functions, automatic HTTPS, preview deploys on every branch, and a global CDN. Paired with the GitHub Student Pack — which covers a .me domain and unlimited private repos — and Supabase's free database tier, a genuinely production-shaped stack costs zero.

That is not a trial. It is not time-limited. For a portfolio, a client site, or a side project, it is enough.

The limits that actually bite

Commercial use. This is the one people miss. The Hobby tier is for non-commercial projects. A portfolio is fine. A client's site that you are invoicing for is not. If you are being paid, you are on the wrong tier, and this is a terms question rather than a technical one — nothing breaks, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed.

Cron frequency. Hobby caps scheduled functions at once per day. My content agents run on a daily brief for this reason, not because daily was the ideal cadence. If your design needs hourly jobs, you will hit this immediately and there is no way around it on the free tier.

Function duration. Serverless functions have an execution ceiling. Anything long-running — a big migration, a slow third-party API, a model call that streams for a while — needs to be a background job rather than a request handler.

Bandwidth. Generous, and the least likely of these to be your problem. Do not architect around it before you have measured it.

There is no free VPS here

Worth stating clearly, because the search brings people looking for one: neither Vercel nor the Student Pack gives you a VPS. This is serverless — you deploy functions and static assets, not a machine you SSH into.

If you specifically need a persistent server — a long-running process, a websocket server you control, anything that must hold state in memory between requests — this is the wrong tool and no amount of free tier fixes that. The Student Pack does include credits with providers that do offer VMs; that is a different route.

What I would tell a student starting today

Take the domain. Deploy something real to it this week. The gap between "I have done tutorials" and "I have a live URL with my name on it" is larger than the gap between any two tutorials, and it is the only part a person looking at your work can see.

Then watch the commercial-use line as soon as anyone pays you. That is the point where the free tier stops being the right answer, and it is a good problem to have.

For the full stack — domain, database, and hosting together — I wrote up the whole setup in the GitHub Student Pack stack post.