Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare Pages

Vercel's own fair use guidelines say the free Hobby plan is for non-commercial personal use only, so a company support site does not belong there without upgrading. Netlify says its free plan can be used commercially, but only in staff forum replies. Cloudflare Pages' terms do not raise the question either way.

Checked 22 August 2026, against each vendor's own pricing, docs or terms pages, and worth checking again yourself before you commit, since these things move.

This page is one part of a larger guide. For the whole subject in one place, see self-hosting a feature request board.

Which of the three actually forbids a commercial support site?

Only one of them does, in writing, and it is the one most people assume is safest.

Those are three different kinds of evidence, not three versions of the same answer.

What does Vercel's own wording actually say?

Vercel's fair use guidelines state it plainly: "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan." The page then defines commercial usage broadly: "any Deployment that is used for the purpose of financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the production of the project, including a paid employee or consultant writing the code." It goes on to count affiliate linking as a site's primary purpose, or carrying an ad platform, as commercial use too, while stating that asking for donations does not.

A support centre for a paid product, built by a paid employee or contractor, is squarely inside that definition. If your support site sits on a Vercel Hobby team today and exists to support something you sell, the free tier is against Vercel's own terms as written, and moving to Pro or Enterprise is the compliant path, not an optional upgrade.

Where does Netlify's "it's fine" actually come from?

Nowhere official, which is worth saying plainly. Two Netlify staff members have said in their own support forum that the free plan may be used commercially, one reply from 2021 and one from January 2024. That is a real, on-the-record statement from people who work there, and it has held for years without being walked back. But it is not the same as a line in the pricing page, the terms of service, or an acceptable use policy, and none of those three documents currently says it. Netlify's acceptable use policy does separately forbid reselling Netlify itself as a hosting product, a different restriction aimed at a different problem.

Treat the forum answer as the best evidence available, not as settled law. If a support site is central to how you make money, a screenshot of a staff forum reply is not the paper trail most businesses would want to lean on indefinitely.

Does Cloudflare Pages actually permit commercial use, or does it just not forbid it?

The second one, and the difference matters. Both of Cloudflare's service-specific terms, the developer platform terms and the application services terms, were checked directly, and neither raises commercial use on the free tier as a restriction. That is a genuine absence of a prohibition, not a written permission you could point to if the question were ever raised. Nobody has said yes. Nobody has said no either.

For a support site, that is a different position from Vercel's explicit no, and arguably more comfortable than Netlify's forum-only yes, since there is nothing on record that would need reversing later. Still worth rereading Cloudflare's terms yourself before relying on it, given how often platform terms change.

How much do the free tiers actually allow?

Commercial permission is one question; whether the free tier can carry real traffic is another.

Cloudflare Pages is the only one with no documented bandwidth ceiling, a real advantage for a support site that might get linked from somewhere busy on a bad day. Netlify's credit model turns one number into four separate meters drawing from the same pool, so a deploy-heavy workflow eats into the same allowance as visitor traffic. Vercel's 100 GB is a fixed, published figure with no ambiguity about what counts against it.

Is Netlify's old "100 GB bandwidth" figure still accurate?

No, worth flagging since the old number is everywhere. Netlify has moved to the credit model above, and posts, forum threads and comparison pages still quoting figures in the shape of "100 GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes" describe a plan that no longer exists for a new signup. If pricing this out from an older article, check Netlify's current pricing page directly.

So which one should a support site actually use?

That depends on whether "free" needs to survive a legal reading or just needs to run. If a support site exists to help sell something, Vercel Hobby is the one option here that its own operator says not to use for that, in writing, so either pay for Vercel or pick one of the other two. Between Netlify and Cloudflare Pages, Netlify has an operator's own staff on record saying commercial use is fine, while Cloudflare simply never raises the question, which some readers will find reassuring and others unsatisfying. Either way, the deciding factor comes down to the published limits above and how the site is deployed day to day: see static site or server for that half of the decision, and what a self-hosted support centre costs for how hosting fits the wider bill.

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