Vercel usage-based resources are the metered units that Vercel bills on top of seats under its Managed Infrastructure model. Vercel states that it bills these resources “by the amount of data transferred, the number of requests made, and the duration of compute resources used.”[1] For a Hobby team each resource has an included allowance. A Pro team receives a monthly credit and then moves to on-demand pricing once the credit is used, and Enterprise terms are custom.[1] This article lists the resources, explains how each is counted and describes Flat Rate CDN, which changes how delivery is billed on Pro.
Editions
The same metered resources appear on every plan, but the allowance differs.
| Resource | Hobby included | Pro | On-demand rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Data Transfer | First 100 GB | Flat Rate CDN | $0.15 to $0.35 per GB, by region[1][2] |
| Fast Origin Transfer | First 10 GB | Usage-based | $0.06 to $0.43 per GB[1][2] |
| CDN Requests | First 1,000,000 | Flat Rate CDN | $2.00 to $3.20 per million[1][2] |
| Active CPU | 4 hours | Usage-based | $0.128 to $0.221 per hour[3] |
| Provisioned Memory | 360 GB-hours | Usage-based | $0.0106 to $0.0183 per GB-hour[3] |
| Function Invocations | First 1,000,000 | Usage-based | $0.60 per million[4] |
| Image transformations | 5,000 per month | Usage-based | $0.05 to $0.0812 per 1,000[5] |
| Image cache reads | 300,000 per month | Usage-based | $0.40 to $0.64 per million[5] |
| Image cache writes | 100,000 per month | Usage-based | $4.00 to $6.40 per million[5] |
| Blob storage | 1 GB per month | Usage-based | $0.023 to $0.041 per GB[6][2] |
Vercel’s Fair Use Guidelines note that the typical monthly usage ranges are “not Pro plan entitlements”: Pro usage is billed through included credit and on-demand rates.[4] Catalog: Hobby plan.
Metrics
Functions: Active CPU, Provisioned Memory and Invocations
Vercel prices Functions on fluid compute across three resources.[3]
- Active CPU is “the CPU time your code actively consumes in milliseconds”, billed per CPU-hour, with billing paused while code waits for external services such as a database or an AI model.[3]
- Provisioned Memory is the memory allocated to function instances, billed in GB-hours for the entire instance lifetime, including during I/O, until the last in-flight request completes.[3]
- Function Invocation counts each request to the function, “regardless of request success or failure”.[3]
A function instance runs in a region and is priced at that region’s rate; the documentation’s example gives a 4 GB function in São Paulo, at $0.221 per hour of CPU and $0.0183 per GB-hour of memory.[3] Washington D.C., Cleveland and Portland carry the lowest Active CPU rate ($0.128 per hour) and Sao Paulo the highest ($0.221).[3] The Hobby plan allows 4 CPU-hours, 360 GB-hours and 1 million invocations.[7] Catalog: Active CPU pauses during I/O wait; Invocations count success and failure.
Edge-runtime Middleware is subject to a fair-use guideline of no more than 50 ms of CPU time on average, and Vercel limits on-demand concurrent builds to 500 per team; further build requests are queued.[4]
Delivery: Fast Data Transfer, Fast Origin Transfer and CDN Requests
CDN pricing covers three resources.[8]
- Fast Data Transfer is data between the CDN and the visitor’s device. It is “calculated based on the full size of each HTTP request and response”, including the body, all headers, the full URL and any compression.[8]
- Fast Origin Transfer is data between the CDN and Vercel Functions, incurred by Functions, Middleware, Blob and the Data Cache used by ISR; both incoming and outgoing bytes count, and Middleware can cause it to accrue twice for one function request.[8]
- CDN Requests are requests the CDN processes; static assets and functions both incur them.[8]
Pro plans charge for CDN usage per unit unless Flat Rate CDN is enabled, and prices vary by the region from which requests originate.[8] Hobby plans include 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 10 GB of Fast Origin Transfer and 1,000,000 CDN requests.[7]
Vercel does not charge for traffic blocked by the Firewall as DDoS mitigation, but usage accrues for requests served before mitigation and for requests not recognised as a DDoS event, including bot and crawler traffic.[9] Catalog: Fast Data Transfer counts headers, URL and body.
Image Optimization
Image Optimization has three metered events: transformations, cache reads and cache writes.[5] Transformations “are billed for every cache MISS and STALE”, cache writes are billed for the same events and measured in 8 KB write units, and cache reads are measured in 8 KB read units and are not billed for every cache hit, only when the image is retrieved from the shared global cache.[5] Enterprise teams created before February 18, 2025 may opt in to this model or stay on the legacy source-image pricing until the contract expires.[5] Catalog: Image Transformation.
Blob storage
Blob usage is measured as storage size (monthly average GB), simple operations (a cache MISS by URL or head()), advanced operations (put(), copy(), list() and creating a store), and Blob Data Transfer; each Blob URL access also counts as a CDN Request, and cache misses also incur Fast Origin Transfer.[6] Hobby users are not charged for extra usage but lose access to Blob until 30 days have passed.[6] Dashboard interactions count as advanced operations.[6]
Builds
Hobby teams use the Basic build machine with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory.[10] For paid teams, Basic is billed at $0.0035 per CPU minute, or $0.007 per build minute, and Elastic build machines, the default for new Pro and Enterprise accounts, are billed by CPU minute starting at that rate.[10] A CPU minute is “one minute of build time multiplied by the number of vCPU cores used”.[10] Pro supports up to 500 concurrent deployments with on-demand concurrency, or 3 if it is off, while Hobby allows 1.[10] Catalog: Build CPU minute.
Observability, analytics and other meters
- Observability Plus is $1.20 per million events on Paid Pro and Enterprise teams, with excluded projects not counting. It is enabled by default for teams created or upgraded to Paid Pro on or after April 3, 2026.[11] Catalog: Observability Plus event.
- Web Analytics gives Hobby 50,000 events per month with collection pausing at the limit; Pro pays $0.03 per 1,000 events with none included.[12] Catalog: Web Analytics event.
- Speed Insights, Drains, Global Config and Microfrontends have their own meters: for example $0.65 per 10,000 Speed Insights events, $2 per million Microfrontends routing requests and $250 per additional microfrontends project per month on Pro.[1]
- Bulk redirects include 1,000 on Pro and 10,000 on Enterprise, with additional capacity at $0.002 per month per 25,000.[1]
Counting and floors
- Many resources are priced by region. The regional pricing page lists price ranges for more than twenty regional resources, and CDN usage is priced by the region from which requests originate.[2][8]
- On Pro, metered usage is first offset by the $20 monthly credit and then billed on demand.[13]
- Hobby teams are paused or blocked, not billed, when included usage is reached.[14]
- Enterprise Flexible Commitment lists its own regional unit rates, for example Fast Data Transfer at $0.15 per GB and CDN Requests at $2.00 per million for the iad1 region.[15]
Virtualization and partitioning
Not applicable. Projects are billed by the team that owns them; the regional rate depends on the project’s region setting.[3]
Cloud and BYOL
No bring-your-own-licence rights apply. Pro teams can reduce delivery cost by choosing Flat Rate CDN or by placing non-critical projects on the Flex CDN tier.[16]
Programs
Flat Rate CDN
Flat Rate CDN is available to Pro teams and gives fixed monthly CDN pricing: a team pays for a capacity tier instead of per unit of usage.[16] Pro includes the lowest tier at no extra cost.[16]
| Tier price | CDN requests | Data transfer |
|---|---|---|
| Included with Pro | 1 million | 1 TB |
| $20 per month | 10 million | 50 TB |
| $100 per month | 50 million | 50 TB |
| $300 per month | 150 million | 50 TB |
While it is enabled, Vercel covers CDN requests, Fast Data Transfer, Blob Data Transfer, Sandbox Data Transfer and Observability events generated from CDN requests as part of the tier.[16] If total usage for a billing cycle exceeds the tier’s capacity, Vercel moves the team to a higher tier at the start of the next cycle; a one-day spike does not trigger an upgrade; and exceeding the highest tier moves the team to on-demand pricing.[16] Tier changes the customer makes take effect at the next billing cycle, and tiers do not downgrade automatically.[16][17]
The Terms of Service add three conditions in Schedule I: Flat Rate CDN is available only with paid plans and is disabled if the team leaves a paid plan, a higher-tier fee carries at least seven days’ notice, and a fair-use breach can lead to reduced CDN performance, disabling the tier or other action.[17]
Flat Rate CDN is meant for “typical web application delivery”. It is not eligible for bulk file distribution, large-scale media delivery that is the majority of bandwidth, use of the CDN as a storage or file hosting system, or workloads where high-volume transfer is the primary function.[16] Vercel may move such projects to Flex CDN, require migration to a more appropriate plan or limit service.[16] Individual non-critical projects can be excluded onto the Flex CDN network, which carries “no latency or availability guarantees” and requires Vercel DNS.[16][18] Vercel describes On-demand CDN, Flat Rate CDN and Flex CDN as the three CDN service tiers.[18]
Catalog: Flat Rate CDN; Flat Rate CDN 10M requests tier; Flat Rate CDN 50M requests tier; Flat Rate CDN 150M requests tier; Flat Rate CDN moves tiers at the next cycle; Flat Rate CDN excludes storage and bulk distribution.
Audits and compliance
Usage is verified by Vercel’s own metering rather than by an audit. Pro teams see usage on the dashboard usage page, and receive notifications at 75% of the monthly credit.[14][13] The Fair Use Guidelines say Vercel will notify a customer whose usage is an outlier and, where possible, “reach out before taking action to address unreasonable usage”.[4] The never-fair-use examples include proxies and VPNs, media hosting for hot-linking, scrapers, crypto mining, unauthorised load testing and penetration testing.[4]
Out of scope
- Enterprise contracted rates, which are in Order Forms.
- Sandbox, Workflow, AI Gateway and Agent meters, covered in Vercel AI products licensing.
- Seats, add-ons and the credit, covered in Vercel Pro plan, seats and monthly credit.
- Domain registration and Marketplace integration charges.