Vercel (Frontend cloud and hosting)
Created by: Guillermo Rauch and team

Vercel runs a generous hobby-free tier as developer top-of-funnel and lets usage drive the upgrade to Pro and beyond.

TL;DR: Vercel's pricing places Hobby as a fully-featured free tier for personal projects with strict commercial-use prohibition. Pro at approximately $20/user/mo unlocks commercial use and team features; Enterprise handles custom infrastructure. Usage overages are metered per resource, which makes the bill scale with success. The lesson: a free tier with crystal-clear commercial-use restriction converts solo developers into paid Pro accounts at exactly the moment the product earns revenue.

What they sell: A frontend cloud platform that hosts Next.js, React, and other modern web apps with edge networking, serverless functions, and developer tooling.
Who it's for: Developers, startups, and enterprises building modern web applications, particularly those using Next.js.
Pricing model: Tiered subscription with per-user base plus metered usage overages
Payment frequency: Monthly per-user base, metered usage billed monthly
Free trial behavior: Hobby tier IS the trial. The commercial-use restriction is the structural trigger to Pro.
Number of tiers: 3

Anchor pattern: Use-case anchor, not price anchor
The Pro tier's $20/user/mo is not designed to look reasonable next to a higher tier. The anchor is the commercial-use restriction on Hobby: any project that earns revenue must upgrade to Pro. This converts the anchor mechanic from a price-comparison nudge into a binary structural requirement, which is more reliable than psychological anchoring.

Upgrade trigger: Commercial-use boundary
The trigger fires the moment a project transitions from hobby to revenue. This is a structural trigger that fires exactly when willingness-to-pay materializes (the project is now generating money) and exactly when continued use on the free tier becomes a TOS violation. Two-sided alignment.

What's working:
Commercial-use boundary as upgrade trigger converts free users at the exact moment they generate revenue.|Per-user base plus metered usage scales pricing with customer success, which lowers commitment friction.|Hobby tier is generous enough that developers ship real projects on it before committing, which builds product habit.|Pro tier price is round and memorable ($20/user/mo) rather than a comparison-shoppable odd number.|Custom Enterprise tier hides infrastructure pricing from competitors while serving the largest deals.|Usage overages metered per resource (bandwidth, function invocations, builds) so the bill maps to specific product behavior the customer can optimize.

What to adapt:
Use a structural upgrade trigger (commercial use, team formation, scale threshold) rather than a feature gate when possible. Structural triggers fire predictably at value moments.|If your product has clear hobby vs commercial use cases, use the boundary as the free-to-paid trigger. The TOS line backs up the price line.|Meter usage per specific resource so the customer can optimize their bill, not just absorb it.

What to avoid:
Do not free commercial use if your competitive position depends on revenue from small commercial users. Hobby-tier free works because Vercel monetizes the moment revenue starts.|Do not adopt per-user base plus usage pricing if your customer cannot predict their usage. Bill-shock is the biggest churn driver in usage-billed SaaS.|Do not gate features behind tier upgrades if usage metering achieves the same revenue. Feature gates fight the buyer; usage metering aligns with them.

Brunson lens:
Stack: Tier-plus-meter stack: each tier is a base subscription plus usage overages, which is a hybrid stack pattern.
Value ladder: Three-rung ladder with Hobby as front-end lead funnel, Pro as subscription core, Enterprise as high-ticket back-end.
Decoy/anchor: Structural anchor (commercial-use boundary), not price anchor. The TOS does the work psychology would otherwise do.
Payment mechanics: Per-user base subscription plus per-resource metered usage. Revenue scales with customer success.

Pricing last verified: 2026-05-17