Vercel's plan card says $20 per user per month. The invoice says something else, because Pro is a seat price plus metered usage — bandwidth, function invocations and duration, build minutes, image optimisation. Here are the plans, the meters, what a small team ends up paying, and what the same backend costs on a flat plan.
September 8, 2026·3 min read
Vercel and DeployCloud are complementary more often than they are rivals: Vercel for the frontend, a flat PaaS for the API, the workers and the database. This page is about the money side of that decision.
Prices checked on vercel's pricing page in September 2026. They change — verify before you budget.
| DeployCloud | Vercel | |
|---|---|---|
| Base price | $19/mo flat | 3 seats × $20 = $60/mo |
| Traffic spike month | Same $19 | Bandwidth + function overages on top |
| Background worker + cron | Included | Not supported — needs a second provider |
| Postgres / Redis | Add-on, included in the plan | Marketplace partner, billed separately |
| Adding a 4th developer | $0 | +$20/mo |
DeployCloud has three plans and no usage meter behind them: Free ($0, 1 app) to try it, Pro ($19/month, up to 10 apps) and Business ($99/month, up to 50 apps). The plan includes builds, deploys, HTTPS, logs, metrics, crons, workers and add-ons like Postgres and Redis. The price does not change when you add a teammate or a second environment.
Rule of thumb: if you are estimating your Vercel bill with a calculator, you already know why flat pricing exists. Deploy the same repo to DeployCloud free and compare the invoice you *don't* get.
For a frontend-first team shipping Next.js or static sites that want preview deployments, edge caching and the framework integrations Vercel builds itself, Vercel is excellent and worth the seat price. Put the long-running backend somewhere flat and keep the frontend where it shines.
The Hobby plan is free for personal, non-commercial projects with usage allowances. Any commercial project has to be on Pro, at $20 per user per month plus usage.
$20 per seat per month is the floor. The variable part is usage above the included allowance — bandwidth, function invocations and execution time, builds, image optimisation — so the real number depends on traffic. Prices as of September 2026; check vercel.com/pricing.
Serverless and edge functions, yes. Anything that has to stay running — WebSockets, workers, long jobs, crons that take minutes — does not fit and usually ends up on a second platform.
Free for one app, Pro $19 a month for up to 10 apps, Business $99 for up to 50. No per-seat pricing and no usage meter: the plan includes compute, builds, HTTPS, workers, crons and add-ons.
For a frontend-first team shipping Next.js or static sites that want preview deployments, edge caching and the framework integrations Vercel builds itself, Vercel is excellent and worth the seat price. Put the long-running backend somewhere flat and keep the frontend where it shines.
Point us at a repo and go — free to start, no credit card, cancel anytime.