Netlify pricing changed more in 2025 than in the previous five years combined: the familiar “100 GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes” free tier was replaced by a credit system for every account created after September 4, 2025. Most articles ranking for this topic still describe the old model. This guide covers the actual numbers as of July 2026: what a credit buys, what the free plan really covers, and what you pay once you outgrow it.
Netlify pricing at a glance
Here’s the full comparison before the details. All figures come from Netlify’s own pricing page and documentation as of July 2026.
| Free | Personal | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $9/month | $20/month | Custom |
| Monthly credits | 300 | 1,000 | 3,000 | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth equivalent (max) | ~15 GB | ~50 GB | ~150 GB | Custom |
| Team members | Individual | Individual | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Concurrent builds | 1 | 1 (up to 3 paid) | 3 (more available) | High-performance |
| Credits run out | Sites pause (hard limit) | Auto recharge: 500 for $5 | Auto recharge: 1,500 for $10 | N/A |
| Deploy previews | Free, unlimited | Free, unlimited | Free, unlimited | Free, unlimited |
| Support | Community | Priority email | Priority email | 24/7 dedicated, 99.99% SLA |
The bandwidth equivalents in that table assume you spend credits on nothing else. In practice, deploys and requests eat into the same pool, which is the part of this model that surprises people most.
Is Netlify free?
Yes, and genuinely so: the Free plan costs nothing, has no time limit, and includes custom domains with SSL, unlimited deploy previews, serverless functions, and a global CDN. For a low-traffic personal project that ships a few updates a month, it works.
What changed is how “free” is measured. The old free tier gave you fixed allowances per resource: 100 GB of bandwidth, 300 build minutes, and so on. The current Free plan gives you 300 credits per month that every metered resource draws from. Bandwidth, production deploys, web requests, and function compute all pull from the same pool.
That single pool is the key mental shift. On the old model, heavy deploying couldn’t touch your bandwidth allowance. On the credit model, everything competes: a busy deploy week directly reduces how much traffic your site can serve that month.
How Netlify credits work
Every metered action has a credit price. These are the current rates:
| Resource | Credit cost | Cash equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Production deploy | 15 credits each | ~$0.10 |
| Web bandwidth | 20 credits per GB | ~$0.13/GB |
| Web requests | 2 credits per 10,000 | ~$0.01 |
| Functions compute | 10 credits per GB-hour | ~$0.07 |
| Database compute | 10 credits per GB-hour | ~$0.07 |
| AI model usage | 180 credits per $1 | $1 |
| Deploy previews, branch deploys, failed deploys | Free | Free |
| Form submissions | Free (unlimited) | Free |
Two of these rates dominate real-world usage for a typical site:
Bandwidth at 20 credits per GB means the Free plan’s 300 credits buy 15 GB of transfer per month, maximum. A media-heavy portfolio or a post that gets shared widely can consume that in days.
Production deploys at 15 credits each means deploying is no longer free. Push to production once a day and you’ve spent 450 credits in a month, more than the entire free allowance, before a single visitor loads a page. Deploy previews and branch deploys stay free, so the cost lands specifically on shipping to production.
What 300 credits actually buys
Abstract credits become concrete quickly with a few scenarios:
A personal site updated twice a month. 2 deploys (30 credits) leaves 270 credits, about 13.5 GB of bandwidth. For a text-heavy blog or a small portfolio, that’s comfortable.
A side project you iterate on weekly. 8 deploys (120 credits) leaves 180 credits, about 9 GB of bandwidth. Still workable, but a traffic spike now has much less headroom.
An actively developed project shipping daily. 30 deploys is 450 credits. The free plan can’t cover the deploys alone. This is the profile that used to fit the old free tier (300 build minutes went a long way) and no longer fits the new one at all.
A static site with real traffic and rare updates. 1 deploy (15 credits) leaves 285 credits, about 14 GB. If your audience grows past a few thousand visits a month with average page weight, you’ll hit the pause.
The pattern: the credit model penalizes exactly two things, shipping often and getting traffic. Which, for an active project, are the two things you want to be doing.
Legacy plans: the old 100 GB free tier
If your Netlify account existed before September 4, 2025, none of the above applies to you yet. Legacy Free, Starter, and Pro plans keep the old model: 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes per month on the free tier, with overage billing rather than pausing.
Two things are worth knowing if you’re on a legacy plan:
- Switching to credit-based pricing is irreversible. Once you move, there’s no path back to the 100 GB model. Don’t switch casually.
- The comparison is stark. Legacy free bandwidth (100 GB) is more than six times the credit-based maximum (~15 GB), and legacy build minutes didn’t compete with bandwidth for the same allowance.
If you hold a legacy account and your usage fits it, it’s currently the best free deal Netlify offers. Treat it accordingly.
What happens when you run out of credits
The Free plan’s behavior is simple and strict: 300 credits is a hard limit with no recharge option. When they’re gone, your sites enter a paused state until the next billing cycle starts. No bill arrives, but your site is down for the remainder of the month. For anything client-facing or business-critical, that trade-off matters more than any dollar amount.
Personal and Pro handle it differently. Both can enable auto recharge: Personal buys 500 extra credits for $5, Pro buys 1,500 for $10, automatically, whenever the monthly allotment runs out. Purchased credits roll over to future months. With auto recharge off, paid plans pause like the free one.
This is the inverse of the old Netlify complaint. The legacy model’s risk was a surprise overage bill after a traffic spike. The credit model’s risk is downtime: predictable cost, unpredictable availability.
Netlify Personal and Pro: what you actually pay
Personal costs $9/month and is aimed at individual developers: 1,000 credits (roughly 50 GB of bandwidth equivalent), smart secret detection, 1-day observability, priority email support, and the auto recharge option at $5 per 500 credits. Concurrency stays at 1 build, expandable to 3 at $40/month per extra slot.
Pro costs $20/month and is the first team plan: 3,000 credits (roughly 150 GB equivalent), unlimited team members, 3 concurrent builds, private organization repos, shared environment variables, and 30-day analytics. Auto recharge is $10 per 1,500 credits.
The unlimited-members detail is genuinely notable: the legacy Pro plan charged $19 per member, so a five-person team paid $95/month before usage. The new Pro flat $20 for any team size is a real improvement for teams, funded, in effect, by the much smaller free tier.
A realistic scenario: a freelancer maintaining three client sites, each updated a few times a month with modest traffic, might spend 60-90 credits on deploys and 300-600 on bandwidth. That fits Personal at $9 with room to spare. The same freelancer on the Free plan would be pausing sites regularly.
How to stay on the free tier
If your project genuinely fits the Free plan’s intent (a personal site, a demo, a learning project), a few habits stretch 300 credits a long way:
Deploy deliberately. At 15 credits each, batching your changes into fewer production deploys is the single highest-leverage habit. Use deploy previews (free) to iterate, and promote to production once.
Keep pages light. Bandwidth is your other main spend. Compressed images, lazy loading, and modern formats directly extend how many visitors 300 credits can serve. Our static website SEO guide covers the performance side in detail.
Watch the request line on busy sites. 2 credits per 10,000 requests is cheap until something gets shared: a million requests is 200 credits on its own.
Skip functions you don’t need. A plain static site spends nothing on compute. Adding serverless functions introduces a new drain on the same pool.
If you have a legacy account, don’t switch. The old 100 GB free tier is strictly more generous for almost every usage profile.
When Netlify stops being the right tool
Netlify remains excellent at what it was built for: Git-based workflows, CI/CD, deploy previews, and serverless functions around a modern frontend. If your project needs that pipeline, Pro at a flat $20 for unlimited team members is now one of the better team deals in the category.
The fit breaks down at the same place the credit math does: a static site that ships often or serves real traffic, without needing the pipeline. Every production deploy costs credits, every GB costs credits, and the free plan answers growth by pausing your site. If your deliverable is a folder of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you’re paying (in credits or dollars) for build infrastructure the project doesn’t use.
For that case, a flat-fee static host is the simpler model. Supadrop charges a flat $5/month after a 15-day free trial: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited deploys, custom domain and SSL included, and deployment is a drag-and-drop that takes seconds. No credits to count, no pause state, no deploy budget. If you got here by testing Netlify’s drag-and-drop uploader, our Netlify Drop vs Supadrop comparison covers that exact workflow, and our Netlify alternatives roundup surveys the broader field. For the fully free end of the spectrum, our GitHub Pages limits guide and best free website hosting comparison show what the no-dollar options really include. And if you’re weighing Netlify against its closest rival, our Vercel pricing breakdown applies this same analysis to the other side.
Netlify’s credit model is honest in one important way: there’s no surprise bill on the Free plan, ever. The cost moved from your wallet to your uptime. Whether that trade works for you comes down to one question: can your site afford to pause when the credits run out? If yes, 300 credits is a fine sandbox. If no, price in $9-20/month, or pick a host whose free or flat tier matches how you actually ship.
Frequently asked questions
Is Netlify free?
Yes, Netlify’s Free plan costs $0 with no time limit and includes custom domains, SSL, deploy previews, and serverless functions. Since September 4, 2025 it runs on 300 credits per month covering bandwidth (20 credits/GB), production deploys (15 credits each), requests, and compute, per Netlify’s credit-based pricing docs.
In practice that’s at most ~15 GB of bandwidth a month, less if you deploy often. When credits run out, sites pause until the next cycle.
What are the Netlify free tier limits?
The Free plan includes 300 credits per month as a hard limit. Bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB, production deploys 15 credits each, web requests 2 credits per 10,000, and function compute 10 credits per GB-hour. Deploy previews, branch deploys, and form submissions are free, and you get 1 concurrent build.
The pricing table above shows how those allowances compare to Personal and Pro.
What happens when Netlify free credits run out?
On the Free plan, your sites enter a paused state until the next billing cycle. There’s no auto-recharge option and no surprise bill: the cost of an overage is downtime, not dollars.
On Personal and Pro, you can enable auto recharge (500 credits for $5, or 1,500 for $10 respectively), and purchased credits roll over to future months. With auto recharge off, paid plans pause too.
How much does Netlify Pro cost?
Netlify Pro costs $20/month and includes 3,000 credits, unlimited team members, 3 concurrent builds, private organization repos, shared environment variables, and 30-day analytics. That flat team price replaces the legacy $19-per-member model, a real improvement for teams.
Individual developers can take the Personal plan at $9/month with 1,000 credits instead. Our Netlify alternatives guide compares both against flat-rate competitors.
Does the Netlify free plan still include 100 GB of bandwidth?
Only for legacy accounts created before September 4, 2025, which keep the old model: 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes per month. Newer accounts get the credit system, where 300 credits equal roughly 15 GB of bandwidth at most.
If you have a legacy account, note that switching to credit-based pricing is irreversible, and the legacy free tier is more generous for almost every usage profile.
Is Netlify good for static websites?
Netlify is strong for Git-based workflows that use its CI/CD, previews, and functions. For a plain static site, the credit model is an awkward fit: every production deploy costs 15 credits, so shipping often burns the free allowance even with minimal traffic.
If your project is a static folder that just needs to be online, a flat-fee host like Supadrop (unlimited bandwidth and deploys at $5/month after a 15-day trial) or the free options in our best free website hosting comparison remove the credit math entirely.