I deployed the same Next.js side project (~40 pages, API routes, 15k monthly visitors) to all three free tiers and ran it for 90 days. Two of them are genuinely generous. One will email you about upgrading the moment you get traction.
90-day results
| Vercel Hobby | Netlify Free | Cloudflare Pages | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 100GB | 100GB | Unlimited |
| Build minutes | 6,000/mo | 300/mo | 500 builds/mo |
| Serverless invocations | 125k/mo | 125k/mo | 100k req/day (3M/mo) |
| Commercial use allowed | ❌ No | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| My 90-day bill | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Upgrade pressure emails | 3 | 0 | 0 |
The trap: Vercel's Hobby license
Buried in the ToS: Hobby accounts cannot be used for commercial purposes. A single affiliate link, a "hire me" page, a paid newsletter signup — technically a violation. They don't police small sites, but the moment you show up on their radar (viral post, real traffic), that ToS is leverage.
Cloudflare Pages has no such clause. Unlimited bandwidth, no questions. That alone settled it for me.
The performance surprise
TTFB from Frankfurt, median over 1,000 requests (via curl -w "%{time_starttransfer}"):
| Provider | Median TTFB |
|---|---|
| Vercel | 184ms |
| Netlify | 231ms |
| Cloudflare | 97ms |
Cloudflare runs your functions in 300+ PoPs. Vercel/Netlify route through far fewer regions on free tiers.
Where each still wins
- Vercel: Next.js features land here first (PPR, partial prerendering). If you live on the bleeding edge, there's no substitute.
- Netlify: Best form handling + split testing built in. Their 300 build minutes run out fast though — I hit the cap in week 3 with preview deploys on.
- Cloudflare: Everything else. Especially anything with bandwidth-heavy assets or real users outside the US.
My call
Personal experiments → Vercel (DX is still unmatched).
Anything that might make a dollar → Cloudflare Pages. I've since migrated 4 projects off Vercel Hobby; the landing page for my current one lives at https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF — served from the free tier, load time from 3 continents under 200ms.
Have you been burned by the Hobby license, or am I being paranoid about a ToS nobody enforces?
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