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Developer Engineering2026-07-27· 9 min read
Three free tiers.
Three very different meanings of “free.”
Pulled straight from each platform's own pricing page and framework docs, published this week — including a billing change that most existing comparison posts haven't caught up to.
CF Pages Free Bandwidth
Unlimited
Static requests too, per official docs
Vercel Hobby Bandwidth
0GB
Fast Data Transfer, official
Netlify Free (2026)
0GB
Equiv., if all 300 credits went to bandwidth
Entry Paid Tier
$0/mo
All three, same headline price
← Back to Global Tech SearchNo build-time race.
One of these three numbers
$20 a month means
The gap most posts describe
What This Post Is, And Isn't
No build-time race.
No number I can't source.
This site (a Next.js 16 App Router project) is the frame of reference throughout, but I'm not going to hand you a “Vercel builds in 47 seconds, Netlify in 82” table — I looked for a shared, methodology-disclosed build-time benchmark across all three platforms and didn't find one worth citing; most of what's circulating is unsourced aggregator content, some of it visibly AI-generated, restating numbers nobody can trace. What I can give you instead is more durable: the pricing and feature-support facts pulled directly from each platform's own current pricing page and framework documentation, checked this week rather than recycled from a 2024 post.
Free-Tier Bandwidth — Where They Actually Diverge
One of these three numbers
just changed under everyone.
Cloudflare Pages' free tier includes genuinely unlimited bandwidth and static requests, per Cloudflare's own pricing page. Vercel's Hobby tier includes 100GB of Fast Data Transfer per Vercel's pricing page. Netlify is the one that moved: since its September 2025 shift to credit-based billing, the free plan gets 300 credits/month total, and every action draws from the same pool — per Netlify's own billing docs, bandwidth costs 20 credits/GB and a production deploy costs 15 credits flat, regardless of build time. Spend the whole 300-credit allowance on bandwidth alone and you get roughly 15GB — before a single deploy or web request is counted.
Free-Tier Monthly Bandwidth
Official pricing pages and docs, July 2026
*Cloudflare Pages' free bandwidth is uncapped; charted at 500 for visual scale only, not a real limit.
The Entry Paid Tier: Same Sticker, Different Deal
$20 a month means
three different things.
All three platforms price their entry paid tier at $20/mo, which makes the headline comparison easy and the actual comparison harder — the included bandwidth behind that price varies by roughly 7x. Vercel Pro includes 1TB of Fast Data Transfer. Cloudflare's Pro tier keeps bandwidth unlimited. Netlify's base Pro tier includes 3,000 credits/month, which works out to roughly 150GB if spent entirely on bandwidth.
Included Bandwidth at the $20/mo Tier
Official pricing pages, July 2026
Next.js Feature Support, Checked Against Current Docs
The gap most posts describe
is smaller than it used to be.
A common claim in older comparison content is that Netlify lacks ISR or Partial Prerendering support. Checked against Netlify's current framework documentation, ISR is fully supported today; Partial Prerendering is Next.js's own experimental feature and isn't listed as supported on Netlify as of this check, so that specific gap is real but narrower than the ISR claim suggests. Cloudflare deploys Next.js through the OpenNext adapter into the workerd runtime rather than Node.js — nearly every feature works, with Node.js-specific middleware as the one documented exception.
| Feature | Vercel | Netlify | Cloudflare Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| App Router / RSC | Native | Full support | Full support (OpenNext) |
| ISR | Native | Full support | Full support (OpenNext) |
| Server Actions | Native | Full support | Full support |
| Middleware | Native, edge | Full support (Edge Functions) | Supported; Node.js middleware not yet |
| Image Optimization | Native | Full support (Image CDN) | Supported (Cloudflare Images) |
| Partial Prerendering | Native (experimental) | Not listed as supported | Supported (experimental) |
| Runtime | Node.js (Fluid Compute) | Node.js (Functions) | workerd, not Node.js |
If bandwidth is your binding constraint — a media-heavy site, or anything with unpredictable traffic spikes — Cloudflare Pages' unlimited free tier is the honest default. If you want the deepest, most first-class Next.js integration and can live inside 100GB, Vercel remains the reference implementation this framework is built against. Netlify is still a fully capable third option, but re-check its current credit math before assuming the free tier covers what it used to. I keep this site on infrastructure sized for exactly this kind of small, solo-maintained project — see my VPS pricing and benchmark comparison for the equivalent breakdown one layer down the stack.
Written by Abhishek Kushwaha
Founder and writer at Global Tech Search, based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Covers AI, infrastructure, markets, and climate with sourced data and original analysis. More about the author →
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Sources
- Vercel, official pricing page (vercel.com/pricing) — fetched directly, July 2026
- Netlify, official pricing page and Credit-Based Billing FAQ (docs.netlify.com) — fetched directly, July 2026
- Cloudflare, official Pages pricing page (pages.cloudflare.com) — fetched directly, July 2026
- Netlify Next.js framework documentation (docs.netlify.com/frameworks/next-js) — feature-support matrix
- Cloudflare Workers Next.js framework guide (developers.cloudflare.com) — OpenNext adapter feature-support matrix
This post deliberately does not include a build-time benchmark table. No shared, methodology-disclosed benchmark across all three platforms could be verified, and several widely-circulated build-time claims traced back to unsourced aggregator content rather than a disclosed test. Pricing and feature-support facts above are pulled directly from each platform's own current documentation instead.
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