Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare: which is cheapest for a Next.js app as traffic grows?

Cloudflare is the cheapest place to host a Next.js app as traffic grows, at every level we priced. Workers Paid is $5 a month for 10 million requests and charges nothing for bandwidth, so an app with 10 million requests and 1 TB of transfer comes to about $5.80. The same app is about $40 on Vercel Pro and about $145 on Netlify, before function compute on those two. Vercel stays close behind until tens of millions of requests; Netlify falls behind as soon as bandwidth climbs. Prices read on each vendor's own pages on November 3, 2026.

One disclosure first. This site, aliteq.com, is a Next.js app on Cloudflare Workers, deployed with the OpenNext adapter, and we pay for Workers Paid ourselves. We've never run Vercel or Netlify in production, so on those two we report their docs and pricing pages, not our experience. None of the three pays us, and there are no referral links on this page.

If "hosting" or "deploy" are new words, read what hosting is and what it costs and what deploy actually means first.

What does each host cost as your traffic grows?

We priced one Next.js app at four sizes, from a side project to a busy site. Each level assumes about 100 KB per request (so 2 million requests means 200 GB) and 30 production deploys a month. Cloudflare stays the cheapest at all four, and the gap widens as bandwidth grows, because bandwidth is the one thing Cloudflare doesn't bill.

How we got each column, so you can redo it with your own numbers:

• Cloudflare Workers Paid. $5 a month includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds. Past that, $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU milliseconds. We assumed every request runs your code for 7 ms of CPU, the figure Cloudflare uses in its own pricing example. At 10 million requests that's 70 million CPU ms, 40 million over, so $0.80 extra. At 50 million it's $12 of requests plus $6.40 of CPU. Requests for static files are free, so a site that serves mostly static pages pays less than this.
• Vercel Pro. $20 a month with $20 of usage credit. On demand in the US, transfer is $0.15 a GB and CDN requests $2 per million, which is the $34 at 2 million requests. Above that we used Vercel's Flat Rate CDN: Pro includes 1 million requests and 1 TB, and the next tiers are $20 a month (10 million requests, 50 TB), $100 (50 million) and $300 (150 million). Functions are extra: $0.60 per million invocations, plus Active CPU from $0.128 an hour and memory from $0.0106 per GB-hour, partly covered by the $20 credit.
• Netlify. Credits: 20 per GB of bandwidth, 2 per 10,000 requests, 15 per production deploy. We picked the cheapest mix of plan and recharges at each level. At 500K requests that's Personal ($9 for 1,000 credits) plus two 500-credit recharges at $5. At 2M it's Pro's 5,000-credit tier ($33). At 10M, 22,450 credits, it's the 15,000-credit tier ($95) plus five 1,500-credit recharges ($50). Compute is extra at 10 credits per GB-hour.

Two honest limits on that table. First, Vercel and Netlify columns leave out function compute, the cost of your server code running, so their real bills are higher than shown, not lower. Second, your traffic mix matters: an app that streams big files or serves many images moves money toward Cloudflare, and an app whose pages are cheap static files changes less. Netlify's pricing page was also showing different prices to different visitors on November 3, 2026 (more on that below).

What it cost us on Cloudflare

aliteq.com is the Cloudflare column in real life. It serves roughly 100,000 requests on a busy day, about 3 million a month, many of them from search and AI crawlers. In late September 2026, before we switched off link prefetching, the site used about 145 to 190 million CPU milliseconds a month, which worked out to roughly $2 to $3.50 a month on top of the $5 plan. Server-rendered Next.js pages use more CPU than Cloudflare's 7 ms example; Cloudflare's limits page says heavier work like server-side rendering "typically use 10-20 ms".

Why is Cloudflare cheaper at high traffic?

Because Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth, and bandwidth is what grows fastest. Its Workers pricing page says: "There are no additional charges for data transfer (egress) or throughput (bandwidth)." It also says "Requests to static assets are free and unlimited." On Vercel and Netlify, every GB your visitors download is billed once you're past what the plan includes.

One footnote to know about: Cloudflare's pricing page says that when its Workers Caching feature is enabled, requests served from that cache are billed "at the same per-request rate as requests that invoke the Worker", including requests to static assets. CPU time is only billed on a cache miss.

Is Vercel's free plan allowed for a site that makes money?

No. Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial personal use only, and ads count. If your app will make money for anyone, budget for Pro at $20 a month from the first day.

Here is the rule as Vercel writes it: "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan." Commercial means any deployment used "for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code."

Vercel lists these examples:

• Any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors of the site
• Advertising the sale of a product or service
• Receiving payment to create, update, or host the site
• "Affiliate linking is the primary purpose of the site"
• "The inclusion of advertisements, including but not limited to online advertising platforms like Google AdSense"

"Asking for Donations does not fall under commercial usage," Vercel adds. So a portfolio is Hobby. A client site you were paid to build is not, even if the client pays nothing to Vercel. Neither is a side project with one AdSense slot or a Stripe button. If you're adding payments, our guide to Stripe or Paddle in a Lovable app is the next step, and that's also where Hobby stops fitting.

We searched Netlify's pricing page and Terms of Use, and Cloudflare's terms, for "commercial", "non-commercial" and "personal use" on October 3 and again on November 3, 2026. Neither has a matching restriction on its free plan. That's an absence, not a promise, so read the terms yourself before you launch.

What do the free plans include?

All three host a small app for $0. What differs is what you may do on the free plan and what happens at its edge: Vercel stops a feature for 30 days, Netlify pauses all your sites, and Cloudflare returns an error page until midnight UTC.

Netlify's 300 free credits look generous until you divide them. Spent on nothing else, they buy 15 GB of bandwidth, or 1.5 million requests, or 20 production deploys. A vibe coder who pushes a fix after every prompt can burn the month in a weekend. Deploy Previews and branch deploys cost 0 credits, so preview first and promote to production less often.

On Cloudflare Free, 2 million requests a month is about 66,700 a day, under the 100,000 cap. CPU is the limit that bites: the free plan allows 10 ms per request, and server-rendered pages often need more. That's exactly what happened to us. On the free plan, our analytics showed 20,662 "exceeded resources" errors in seven days, served to readers as 503 pages, and moving to Workers Paid on September 27, 2026 took them to zero.

What does overage cost past the included usage?

Bandwidth is where they split: about $0.13 to $0.20 a GB on Netlify, $0.15 on Vercel on demand, and $0 on Cloudflare. Requests are cheaper on Cloudflare too.

Vercel Pro is a $20 monthly platform fee with one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit. Extra paid seats are $20 a month each; viewer seats are free. Vercel's Flat Rate CDN gives Pro a lowest tier of 1 million CDN requests and 1 TB of transfer at no extra cost, and you switch it on in your team's Billing settings. "A one-day spike doesn't trigger an upgrade"; a month over capacity moves you to the next tier from the next billing cycle. Vercel also says Flat Rate CDN isn't for bulk file distribution or media-heavy delivery.

Netlify bills everything in credits. Personal includes 1,000 credits a month and Pro starts at 3,000, with Pro tiers of 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000 credits. Extra credits come through auto recharge: 500 for $5 on Personal, 1,500 for $10 on Pro. That makes a credit worth 1 cent on Personal and about 0.67 cents on Pro.

Cloudflare Workers Paid has a "minimum charge of $5 USD per month for an account." That covers 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds a month, then $0.30 per extra million requests and $0.02 per extra million CPU milliseconds. The Paid plan has no daily request cap, and CPU time counts only while your code runs.

What stops a surprise bill on each platform?

Only Netlify and Vercel can stop your bill automatically, and both do it by taking your site offline. Cloudflare's paid plan has budget alerts that only send an email. Pick the failure you'd rather have: a paused site or an open-ended bill.

Vercel Pro has Spend Management. You set a spend amount, and Vercel sends alerts at 50%, 75% and 100%. It can call a webhook and, if you switch it on, pause the production deployment of every project. Vercel is blunt: "Setting a spend amount does not stop usage on its own." The pause switch is the part that caps spend. The check "happens every few minutes", so you can overshoot. Pausing doesn't stop AI Gateway or v0 usage billed to your team, and each project has to be resumed by hand. New customers get spend notifications at $200 a billing cycle by default.

Netlify caps by design. Auto recharge is off by default, so a paid plan behaves like a prepaid card. When the credits run out, "all of your web projects (sites/apps) are paused" and visitors see a "Site not available" page. Read that "all" carefully: one runaway project takes every site on the team down with it. Alerts arrive at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100%. Turning on auto recharge keeps sites up and removes the cap.

Cloudflare caps the free plan by request count: after 100,000 requests in a day, Error 1027 until midnight UTC. On Workers Paid there's no dollar cap. Budget alerts email you when account-wide spend crosses a threshold, and Cloudflare's docs say: "Budget alerts are informational only. They do not pause or cap usage." The real guard is per request: set a CPU limit (cpu_ms) in your Wrangler config so one runaway request can't burn minutes of CPU.

That's the guard we use. We set cpu_ms to 5,000 so a stuck render can't run up the bill. We also found that link prefetching was 47% of our Worker invocations and switched it off. On a usage-billed host, a framework feature can be your biggest customer.

That last step matters on every host. Our guide to env variables and secrets explains why a key in your frontend code is public, whichever platform serves it.

Does Next.js run as well on Netlify and Cloudflare as on Vercel?

It runs on all three, through three different routes. Vercel runs it natively, Netlify through the OpenNext adapter, and Cloudflare through vinext (in beta) or the OpenNext adapter. The further you get from Vercel, the more often a Next.js feature needs a workaround, and that's the real price of Cloudflare's lower bill.

• Vercel. Its docs call Next.js "a fullstack React framework for the web, maintained by Vercel" and say "deploying to Vercel is zero-configuration". The code lives in the MIT-licensed vercel/next.js repository on GitHub.
• Netlify. Its docs say "Netlify supports all major Next.js features with zero configuration, via our open-source OpenNext adapter." Middleware runs as Edge Functions, with a stated Node.js middleware limitation.
• Cloudflare. Its Next.js guide says "Cloudflare recommends vinext as the default way to run Next.js applications on Cloudflare Workers" and "vinext is in beta". The OpenNext adapter stays documented for existing apps, which is what we use. Cloudflare Pages is now the route only for a static export.

We hit some of the friction ourselves. Our production build has to use webpack, because Turbopack chunks failed at runtime on Workers. Next.js middleware that needs Node.js doesn't run in our setup, so our redirects live in the config file. Each Worker gets 128 MB of memory on both plans, and we once blew it by loading full article bodies for a list page. If your app is a few pages and a form, you won't meet any of this. If it's a big App Router app with heavy middleware, Vercel removes a layer of problems for $20 a month.

Which one should you pick?

Pick by what your app does and how big it will get. A free personal project fits anywhere. A money-making app is cheapest on Cloudflare at every size, simplest on Vercel Pro, and predictable on Netlify if you can live with a pause at the limit and modest bandwidth.

Whichever you choose, the host isn't your only bill. The database, auth and AI calls usually cost more than the hosting. Caching decides how often your server code runs at all, and our caching explainer shows why. If you've left the platforms behind and are on raw cloud, why your AWS bill is so high is the same exercise one level down. More developer guides live in the software hub.

The short version: Cloudflare is the cheapest home for a growing Next.js app because bandwidth is free, Vercel Pro is the easiest and stays within about $35 of it up to 10 million requests, and Netlify is the one to watch once your bandwidth climbs. For today's numbers, open each vendor's pricing page from the sources below; they change.