The Vercel alternative that stops metering your Next.js app.
Same GitHub push, same Next.js build, different bill. Your app runs as an always-on container with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM per app, at a flat $10 to $129 a month with no seat charges, no build meter, and no request-duration limit.
Vercel pricing and Host Little pricing, line by line.
Two rows go their way. They are still in the table, because a comparison that never loses is not a comparison.
| Comparison point | Vercel Pro | Host Little |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $20 per developer per month on Pro, plus usage meters for transfer, edge requests, function CPU, ISR reads and writes, image transformations, and build minutes. | A flat $10 to $129 a month. Bandwidth past the included amount is the only dimension that meters at all. |
| Commercial use on the cheapest plan | Hobby is licensed for non-commercial personal projects. Anything you charge money for belongs on Pro. | Included from $10. You can invoice a client from the Launch plan on day one. |
| Cold starts | Serverless instances scale to zero when idle, so a request that arrives after a quiet period waits for one to be started. | None, and not as a tuning achievement: the process is already running, so there is nothing to start. |
| Request duration | Every function runs under a maximum duration ceiling. When the request reaches it, the request is cut off. | No request-duration limit. Long jobs, streamed model output, file uploads, and WebSocket connections run to completion. |
| What you are actually renting | Managed capacity you do not size, billed by active CPU and provisioned memory after the fact. | A container you can name: 0.5 vCPU · 1 GB RAM on Launch, and 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM per app on every plan above it. |
| Apps per account | Unlimited projects on Pro. Each one adds its own usage to the same invoice. | 1 to 15 apps depending on plan, each with its own container. The count is a per-plan ceiling, not a shared pool. |
| Builds | Build CPU minutes are a billed usage meter. | Unlimited, and structurally unbillable. There is no build meter to read, so a bad afternoon of retries costs nothing. |
| Bandwidth past the included amount | $0.15/GB fast data transfer in Washington D.C. (iad1), their cheapest US region, after the first 1 TB. | $0.01/GB, after 500 GB to 15 TB included by plan. |
| Developers who can deploy | $20 a month each. Read-only viewers are free. | Unlimited collaborators, with admin, developer, billing, and viewer roles. No plan on the ladder prices a seat. |
| The month traffic goes sideways | Spend management can notify you as usage climbs, and can pause the project when the limit is reached. | You set the monthly ceiling on metered usage, defaulting to $20 on Launch and $150 on Agency. Past the ceiling the app stays online. |
| A bad release | Roll back to an earlier deployment once you notice. | The bad release never takes over. A new container has to pass its health check before it replaces the one serving traffic. |
| Databases, caches, and object storage | Provisioned through marketplace partners and billed alongside your usage. | Not sold here, and not pretended otherwise. Point environment variables at the Postgres, Redis, or bucket you already run. |
| API and coding agents | REST API with account-scoped access tokens. | A scoped v1 API for account, projects, environment variables, logs, and redeploys, plus agent keys where an agent-initiated write waits in a queue for you to approve, deny, or undo. |
Vercel figures are their own published Pro rates for Washington D.C. (iad1), read on 2026-07-29. Where their number depends on configuration, the mechanism is described instead of a figure. Check both sides before you switch.
Side by side
What your Vercel bill looks like here.
Set your monthly transfer and team size. Their side is priced from their published rates; ours is the plan that covers that traffic.
Metered host
$306.61
per month
Host Little Solo
$19.00
2 TB included
Save $287.61 each month.
Estimate for one developer and about 21.05M monthly requests at 95 KB each.
See metered invoice15 meters billing
- Fast data transfer
- 2 TB$146.40
- Edge requests
- 21.05M$22.11
- Edge request CPU duration
- 1.7 hrs$0.52
- Fast origin transfer
- 259 GB$15.52
- Function invocations
- 14.34M$8.60
- Active CPU
- 97.0 hrs$12.42
- Provisioned memory
- 477 GB-hrs$5.06
- ISR writes
- 7.45M$29.79
- ISR reads
- 18.34M$7.34
- Image transformations
- 46.8K$2.34
- Image cache writes
- 381.8K$1.53
- Image cache reads
- 1.03M$0.41
- Observability events
- 42.52M$51.03
- Web analytics events
- 115.9K$3.48
- Build CPU minutes
- 23 min$0.08
- Metered subtotal
- $306.61
- Pro plan · 1 developer × $20.00
- $20.00
- Included usage credit
- −$20.00
- Total
- $306.61
Estimate only. Built from Vercel's published Pro rates for Washington D.C. (iad1), their cheapest US region, as of 2026-07-29, and scaled from a real measured billing cycle for a small Next.js site (407.0K requests, $2.75 metered). Your own usage mix will differ. Includes Vercel's $20 monthly Pro usage credit, applied to metered usage after the included 1 TB transfer and 10M edge requests. The credit does not roll over. This comparison holds us on Solo at every traffic level, including overage past its included 2 TB.
See our plansWhat changes when you leave metered hosting.
Not the deploy flow. That stays a git push. What changes is which decisions the billing model was making for you.
- The invoice becomes one number
- A metered host bills the shape of your traffic: requests, CPU seconds, cache reads, image transforms, build minutes. Reading it is a monthly job. Here the plan is the bill, and the only thing that can move it is bandwidth over the included amount.
- Slow work stops being a design constraint
- When execution is timed, you architect around the timer: queues in front of the thing you actually wanted to run, chunking, a second service for the long job. A process with no request-duration limit lets the long job just be a route.
- State can live in memory again
- A persistent process keeps a warm cache, an open database pool, and an in-flight WebSocket between requests. That is the one thing serverless cannot copy, and it is the reason there is nothing to cold-start.
- Adding a teammate costs nothing
- Per-seat pricing quietly decides who gets access. When collaborators are unlimited and roles are free, the contractor who needs to read a deploy log gets a viewer account instead of your credentials.
How to move a Next.js app off Vercel.
Six steps, and your domain keeps serving from Vercel until the last two. There is no window where the site is nowhere.
- Step 1
Connect the repository
Authorise GitHub and pick the repository and the branch you want deployed. Push-to-deploy is wired from that point on.
- Step 2
Bring your environment variables
Paste in what the app already reads. Production and development are two separate lists against two separate runtimes, so a staging key cannot leak into live.
- Step 3
Override the build if it needs it
Install, build, and start commands, base and publish directories, ports, and pre/post-deploy hooks are all editable. Most Next.js apps need none of it.
- Step 4
Deploy and check the temporary URL
Every project gets a working slug.hostlittle.app address immediately. Exercise the app there while Vercel is still serving your domain. A build that fails its health check never replaces the running container.
- Step 5
Move the domain
Add your custom domain, point DNS, and HTTPS is issued and renewed for you. Apex and www are both handled.
- Step 6
Turn the old project off
Only once you are satisfied. Nothing about the cutover is time-boxed, and nothing forces you to move the domain on the same day you deploy.
Questions people ask before leaving Vercel.
Is Host Little a good Vercel alternative for Next.js?
It is the right trade if predictable cost and long-running server work matter more to you than a managed serverless fleet. Your Next.js app runs as an always-on Node.js process with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM per app on Solo and above, deployed from GitHub with a health check gating each release. The price is flat from $10 a month and does not move with requests, function time, or build minutes.
Can I run a commercial project on the cheapest plan?
Yes. Commercial use is included from the $10 Launch plan, which runs 1 app at 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB RAM with 500 GB of bandwidth. Vercel's Hobby tier is licensed for non-commercial personal projects, so a paying side project has to move to Pro there.
Does Host Little have cold starts?
No. Your app is a container that stays running between requests rather than a function that is started on demand, so there is no first-request penalty after an idle period. This is a property of the architecture, not a number we tuned.
Are there execution time limits on Server Actions or streaming responses?
No. There is no request-duration limit. Streamed model output, long uploads, background work inside a request, server-sent events, and WebSocket connections all run to completion.
Do you charge per developer seat?
No plan does. Collaborators are unlimited with admin, developer, billing, and viewer roles. On Vercel Pro each developer who can deploy is $20 a month, so a four-person team is $80 a month before any usage.
What happens if my app suddenly gets a lot of traffic?
Bandwidth past your plan's included amount is $0.01/GB, and you set a monthly ceiling on metered usage in Billing. Past that ceiling the app stays online. Builds are unlimited and cannot be billed, and there is no per-request or per-invocation charge to spike in the first place.
Do I get a preview deployment for every pull request?
Not per pull request. Each project gets one persistent development environment on a branch you choose, with its own environment variables, its own runtime, and a stable URL that updates when you push.
Does Host Little provide a database?
No. There is no managed Postgres, Redis, or object storage on any plan. Add the connection details for the services you already use as environment variables; the app runs unchanged.
How do I move a Next.js app off Vercel?
Connect the GitHub repository and choose a branch, copy your environment variables across, deploy, and test on the slug.hostlittle.app URL the project gets immediately. Point your custom domain at Host Little when you are satisfied, and turn the old project off after that. Your domain keeps serving from Vercel the entire time you are testing.
Start here
Move the repository. Keep the price.
Deploy from GitHub to an always-on container from $10 a month. Unlimited builds, unlimited collaborators, and 30 days money back.
- Month to month
- Commercial use from $10
- 30-day money back
No projects yet
Connect a GitHub repository and choose the branch you ship from. Everything after that is a push.