Hosting for small projects: Vercel and Neon free tiers or self-hosting?
Published
Short answer
For prototypes and personal projects, free plans (Vercel Hobby, Neon Free) are often enough. But for a commercial project, read the plan terms first: Vercel Hobby is for non-commercial use only, and a site that advertises a service counts as commercial. If your load is steady and predictable, a VPS does the same job for less, in exchange for taking on the maintenance. The limits below are as of October 2026; check the official pages before you rely on them.
What the free plans actually give you (October 2026)
- Vercel Hobby: free, but only for personal, non-commercial use. Included are 100 GB of fast data transfer and 1 million function invocations per month.
- Neon Free: 1 GB of storage per project, 100 CU-hours of compute, and a database that suspends itself after 5 minutes of inactivity (scale to zero). If the CU-hours run out, compute stops until the next period; no data is deleted.
- Supabase Free: 500 MB for the database, 1 GB of file storage, 2 active projects, and projects that are paused after a week of inactivity.
- Firebase Spark: 1 GiB of Firestore storage and 50 thousand reads and 20 thousand writes per day. Cloud Functions are not available on Spark; you need the Blaze (pay as you go) plan.
These numbers can change. Check each service's current pricing page before you decide.
The commercial-use trap
Vercel defines commercial usage as any deployment used for the financial gain of anyone involved in producing it, and its examples include advertising the sale of a product or service, receiving payment to create or host the site, and showing ads. So a freelance portfolio built to attract clients may not fit the Hobby plan. If you're unsure, ask Vercel support or move to Pro.
Scale to zero: the hidden cost of a free database
Services like Neon stay free by suspending an unused database. The first request to a suspended database is slow by the time it takes to wake up. On a low-traffic site, the first visitor feels that delay. For a database that must always be warm, a paid plan lets you turn scale to zero off.
When self-hosting makes sense
- Your load is steady and predictable: the flat monthly price of one VPS is often lower than a pay-as-you-go model.
- You have several small projects: you can run them all on one server and share the cost.
- You want costs that don't surprise you.
- Where the data lives matters.
In return, updates, backups, security and monitoring become yours, and one server is a single point of failure. If you don't have time for that, a managed service is cheap.
A practical decision guide
- Prototype or personal project: the free plans (Vercel Hobby, Neon Free).
- Commercial project with low, variable traffic: Vercel Pro with Neon's paid pay-as-you-go plan. The bill stays small and you carry no maintenance.
- Commercial project with steady load and several projects: one VPS running Docker Compose and Caddy.
- Mobile app, fast MVP, real-time sync: consider Firebase or Supabase (see the next post).
Questions
- Can I keep a portfolio site I use to find clients on Vercel Hobby?
- By Vercel's definition, a site that advertises a service is commercial usage, and the Hobby plan doesn't cover it. You'd need to move to Pro or pick another host. If you're unsure, ask Vercel support.
- Is Neon's free plan enough for a real project?
- It can be for small, low-traffic projects. But the database suspends when idle and the first request is delayed, and when the CU-hours run out compute stops until the next period.
- Is a single VPS cheaper than Vercel?
- Usually, for apps with steady and predictable load. But updates, backups and monitoring are yours, so your time cost goes up.
I do this kind of work
Written by Mert Yılmaz, freelance fullstack developer.