Vercel’s free plan is non-commercial. Read that before your side project grows.

There’s a clause most side projects only discover after they succeed. Vercel’s Hobby plan — the free tier that hosts half the internet’s weekend projects — is limited to personal, non-commercial use. It’s stated plainly in their fair use guidelines.

To be clear: Vercel is an excellent product, the free tier is genuinely generous, and the restriction is fair — they can’t subsidize businesses forever. The problem isn’t the clause. The problem is that it’s aimed at a category — “commercial projects” — that side projects join gradually and by accident.

Nobody starts a commercial project

You start a toy. A recipe organizer for your house, a dashboard for your padel group, a tool your agent built in an afternoon. Then, if you’re lucky, it grows — and each step of growth quietly moves you toward that clause:

• You add a donation link to cover costs.
• You put up an ad, or an affiliate link.
• Three users ask for a feature and you charge $3/month for it.
• You show it to a client as part of freelance work.

Every one of those is commercial use. None of them feels like a launch. There’s no alarm that goes off — your project simply stops being allowed on the plan it lives on, at exactly the moment things start going well.

The math when it does matter

The sanctioned path is upgrading to Pro: $20 per member per month, before usage. That’s the correct price for a professional team’s frontend platform. For a side project earning $15 a month from four subscribers, it’s the difference between a hobby that pays for itself and a hobby with a payroll.

Infrastructure priced per seat assumes the seat produces professional value. Small projects need the other kind of pricing — per use — where a thing that’s barely used costs barely anything, whether or not it charges its users.

Where Alora stands

Alora doesn’t have a free tier with terms to outgrow, because it doesn’t need one: there’s no subscription at all. You load prepaid credits and usage draws them down — $0.01 per active hour, $0 while the app sleeps, $0.40/GB/month for storage. A typical project costs under a dollar a month.

And commercial use is welcome from the first visitor. Charge your users, run your ads, demo to your clients — the price is the same, because you’re paying for compute, not for permission. When the project earns $15 a month, your hosting is still pocket change and nothing about your plan has to change.

One more difference worth knowing: on Alora, the deploy itself is done by your agent, not by you in a dashboard. Connect it once, then “put this online” is a sentence.