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Question

Vercel Hobby says non-commercial only, I just added Stripe. Do I have to upgrade?

Solved · 904 views · asked by bellaship · edited

Built a small booking app for yoga teachers with Bolt, deployed on Vercel Hobby (free). Now I added Stripe so teachers can pay $8/month. Someone said Hobby isn't allowed for commercial stuff. Is that true? $20/month is more than I make right now (3 customers lol).

What I’ve tried

Read the Vercel fair use page, it says Hobby is for personal non-commercial use. Not sure if tiny counts.

Comment
Yes it counts, there's no "tiny" exception. Options below. deploydan · edited

2 answers

Marked as helpful by the asker
deploydan · edited

Hobby is personal, non-commercial use. Taking payments is commercial, regardless of size. You won't get a bill, but they can pause the project, which is worse on a paying customer's booking day.

Options:

  1. Vercel Pro ($20/month). Simplest, nothing to change. Fair if it's the only paid thing.
  2. Netlify / Cloudflare Pages free tiers allow commercial use (check current terms). If the Bolt app is mostly a static React/Vite build + Supabase, Cloudflare Pages is basically free and fine.
  3. A small VPS (~€5/month) with Coolify. Cheapest per month, but now you're the ops person.

At 3 customers, option 2 if the app is static, option 1 if it relies on Next.js server features.

Comment
It's a Vite React app, no server stuff. Moved to Cloudflare Pages in an hour. $0 and legal. bellaship · edited
Good call. Remember to set the SPA fallback so deep links don't 404 (_redirects or the built-in SPA handling). rafa_dev · edited
Thanks for this, I was also on Hobby with a paid app. Moved it. tessa_k · edited
kofi_mensah · edited

Netlify's free tier is also fine for commercial use last I checked. Either way, read the current terms, they change.

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