Netlify Free Tier & Pricing in 2026 — The Real Limits

Netlify's free plan is $0 a month and gives you 300 credits. That's the entire allowance. Not gigabytes, not build minutes — 300 credits, drawn down against a rate card where a production deploy costs 15 credits, bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB and 10,000 web requests cost 2. When the 300 are gone, Netlify doesn't throttle you and doesn't bill you. Every project on the team is paused until the next billing cycle starts.

Last verified: 22 August 2026.

If you've read that Netlify's free tier includes 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes, that's the Legacy free plan, and it's still true if your account is old enough. Since 4 September 2025 every new Netlify account goes onto a credit-based plan, and accounts predating that are what Netlify now calls Legacy pricing plans. The old quota numbers survive in the Legacy table and nowhere else. They're at the bottom of this page, so you can tell which world a figure came from.

The free tier, every published limit

This is the credit-based Free plan, not Legacy. Everything here comes from Netlify's own docs and pricing page, re-fetched on 22 August 2026.

Sources for those rows: how credits work, credit-based pricing plans, functions configuration, database billing and the pricing page.

The 300 is a per-cycle grant that resets, not a balance you accumulate. Netlify: "In general, monthly plan credits do not roll over, but if you have a Pro plan with 5,000 monthly credits or higher, then any leftover credits can roll over for an additional month." So on Free, unused credits are gone at the end of the cycle, and rollover is a Pro-and-above feature gated at 5,000 credits.

One detail worth knowing before you plan around a reset date: the cycle is not the calendar month. The billing FAQ says "the start of your monthly billing cycle is customized for when you open and start your Netlify team account." If you're paused and waiting, the date that matters is your signup anniversary, not the 1st.

What one credit buys

The rate card is identical on Free, Personal, Pro and Enterprise. I checked the Enterprise-specific page separately: it lists six rates — production deploys, previews, compute, AI inference, bandwidth and web requests — and every one matches the self-serve card exactly, which is unusual and worth knowing before a sales call. It carries no Forms row; the "free and unlimited" wording for Forms comes from the self-serve card's "Free for all credit plans".

Three of those moved on 14 April 2026, and not all in the same direction: bandwidth went from 10 to 20 credits per GB, compute from 5 to 10 credits per GB-hour, and web requests got cheaper, from 3 to 2 credits per 10,000. Same date, form submissions went from 1 credit each to free and unlimited. If you built a cost model before April, your bandwidth and compute lines are half what they should be.

Failed deploys cost nothing. So do rollbacks to a previous production deploy — only a successful production deploy spends the 15.

The arithmetic Netlify doesn't do for you

This is the part I want to be careful about, because it's where every other page on this subject goes wrong. Netlify publishes no gigabyte, build-minute or invocation allowance for any credit-based plan. It publishes a credit count and a set of per-unit rates. Any sentence of the form "the Netlify free tier gives you N GB" is somebody's division, including mine below.

So here's my division, shown in full, on Netlify's published figures.

Every one of those is a ceiling in a degenerate case, not an allowance, and they're mutually exclusive. You cannot have 15 GB of bandwidth and 1.5 million web requests, because the same traffic bills against both meters at once. Serving 15 GB while making zero requests is not a thing. A small site with a handful of deploys a month has real headroom here; an Agent Runner has none, because $1.67 of model spend is a couple of runs and the sandbox the agent works in bills to the compute meter on top of the inference meter. If you're budgeting model calls specifically, the free AI API rate limits page is a better starting point than a Netlify credit balance.

What happens at zero

This is the question that costs people money, so here it is verbatim from Netlify's billing FAQ:

Once your monthly credit allotment is used up for all web projects on your team, all of your web projects (sites/apps) are paused and visitors to your web projects will find a Site not available page at each of your web project's URLs. In addition, while your web projects are paused, they will not receive new web requests, web traffic, or form submissions and you cannot trigger new production deploys.

Not throttled. Not auto-billed. Hard-stopped. And the blast radius is the whole team: "if one site/web project exceeds its limits, all sites/projects on your account will be paused." One runaway function on a scratch project takes down everything else on that account. Free has no escape hatch — no auto recharge, no credit packs — so you wait for the cycle to reset, when projects resume automatically, or you upgrade.

Personal and Pro can top up instead: 500 credits for $5 and 1,500 credits for $10 respectively, the same rate whether it's auto recharge or a manually bought credit pack, and purchased credits never expire. Credits are drawn soonest-expiry-first, so your monthly allotment burns before your packs do.

Warnings arrive at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of the allotment. Or at 50%, 75% and 100%, depending on which Netlify page you're reading — see below.

The paid bands

The Pro card on the pricing page says "$20 /month" and lists five credit amounts in a selector. It does not price four of them. Those prices live only in the docs:

Rollover starts at the 5,000-credit tier and unused credits survive exactly one extra cycle. The $20 Pro tier gets none. Pro seats became free and unlimited on 14 April 2026, so the $20 is for the whole team; Legacy Pro is still billed at $19 per team member per month, which is a different plan with a coincidentally similar number. Concurrent builds: 1 on Free with no way to buy more, 1 included on Personal, 3 on Pro, $40 a month for each additional build on the two paid plans.

Netlify does not publish an Enterprise dollar price or an Enterprise credit allotment. I looked on the pricing page, pricing.md, the credit-based plans doc and the Enterprise credits doc; all four say Custom or point at Contact Sales.

Where Netlify's own pages disagree

I checked the marketing pages against the docs line by line, and they don't fully agree. None of it looks deliberate, and all of it is worth knowing before you quote a figure at someone.

Payment methods, and this one is provably stale. The pricing page FAQ says "Netlify only accepts credit cards unless you have a Netlify Enterprise plan, in which case we do accept payment via ACH or wire transfer." The billing overview docs say "Netlify accepts credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Enterprise plan customers can also pay via ACH or wire transfer." Normally you'd shrug at that. But Netlify's changelog dates the Apple Pay and Google Pay addition to 12 August 2026, which means the docs are current and the marketing FAQ simply wasn't updated when the product changed. It was still wrong on 22 August. Trust the docs.

Notification thresholds. Docs FAQ: 50%, 75%, 90%, 100%. Pricing page FAQ: 50%, 75%, 100%. Same vendor, same feature, one missing step. Given the payment-method precedent I'd assume the pricing page is the stale surface here too, but I can't prove it the way I can prove the other one.

Can a free account be charged? The pricing page says "The free plan is always free, with hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded or incur any costs." I went looking for a contradiction in the legal terms and didn't find one. Section 5 of the Self-Serve Subscription Agreement reads, in full: "For Free Usage Tier Customers, if use exceeds the Services capacity applicable to the Free Usage Tier, Customer will incur and agrees to pay additional fees that reflect actual usage, as such fees are described in the terms of the Free Usage Tier description." Quoted only as far as "actual usage" it sounds like the binding document contradicting the marketing page. Read to the end of the sentence it doesn't: it sets no fee of its own, it defers to the Free tier's published terms — and those terms are the ones saying the limits are hard and cannot incur cost. The two documents agree. Section 6 is the one with teeth, reserving the right to "shut down Free Usage Tier website projects without notice for any reason or no reason."

Database backup retention on Free. The plans doc says 7-day backup retention; the database billing doc's own table says 3 days for Free. Personal and Pro agree across both pages. Only the Free cell disagrees.

Credit pack size. The buy-credit-packs page has a per-band table (Personal 500 for $5, Pro 1,500 for $10) and then an instruction sentence one paragraph below that says "Each credit pack contains 1500 credits for $10.00" with no band named. Personal users following the instructions get the wrong number.

Functions, edge functions and the database

Functions on credit plans are billed by GB-hour, never by invocation. Default memory is 1024 MB and only credit-based Pro and Enterprise can raise it, up to 4096 MB, so a Free-plan function is pinned at 1 GB — which is what makes the compute arithmetic above unusually clean.

Two of those rows are plan-banded and both lock Free out: memory is raisable only on Credit-based Pro and Enterprise, and region is changeable only on Pro and Enterprise. So a Free-plan function is pinned at 1 GB in US East (Ohio), whatever your users' geography. The remaining six — three execution limits and three payload limits — apply to everyone, Free through Enterprise.

Edge functions get 20 MB of code after compression, 512 MB of memory across the deployed set, 50 ms of CPU per request and a 40-second response-header timeout. Invocations are a different story: the edge functions limits page says "the number of invocations allowed per month varies by team plan" and tells you to check your dashboard or ask Support. The number exists; Netlify chooses not to print it. On credit plans that's semi-academic, since edge functions meter through web requests rather than compute, and cached responses don't count at all.

Netlify Database is credit-plans-only, and it's the one place Netlify still publishes hard per-plan gigabyte numbers. Free gets 3 databases, 20 branches each, 48 compute units per billing period, 5 GB written, 5 GB bandwidth and 5 GB storage per database, with a maximum of 1 compute unit and a 5-minute sleep-on-inactivity ceiling. Personal and Pro both move to 100 GB on all three of the GB rows.

There's an open thread here. The database docs say storage "is free until July 1, 2026" and "will be billed no earlier than July 1, 2026, with rates announced in advance." That date is 52 days in the past as I write this, the page is unchanged, and no rate has appeared on it, the pricing page, pricing.md or the plans doc. Storage is currently unbilled. I wouldn't build a 12-month budget on that continuing, and I'm not going to guess when it stops.

The Legacy plans, and where the old numbers come from

If your account predates 4 September 2025 you're on a Legacy plan, and none of the above applies to you. Legacy Free and Starter get 100 GB of bandwidth a month, 300 build minutes, 125k function invocations per site per month, 1M edge function invocations, 100 form submissions per site per month, 1 concurrent build and 500 sites. That's the source of essentially every Netlify free-tier figure circulating online.

Legacy overage behaves differently depending on which meter you blow, which is a nicer design than the credit-plan pause: hit the build limit and your sites keep serving while builds are disabled account-wide; hit any other meter and builds are disabled and all sites are paused until you upgrade.

Netlify has not announced an end-of-life date for Legacy plans. The pricing FAQ still says you can keep your plan with no action required, and I swept the whole August 2026 changelog for a sunset announcement and found nothing. But moving is one-way — "you cannot revert to a Legacy plan from a Credit-based plan. This change is permanent" — and migrating terminates any Analytics subscription immediately with no refund, and moves functions to GB-hour billing where, in Netlify's words, "there is no longer a free tier." Forms get better: free and unlimited instead of 100 per site.

The Open Source plan

Worth a paragraph because it's the only Netlify tier where running out of credits doesn't take your site down. The Open Source plan is 10,000 credits a month, free production deploys, Deploy Previews on every PR, unlimited team members, and explicitly: "Sites stay live even if credits run out." Extra credits are sold at Pro rates.

The qualification bar is real. A license from the Open Source Initiative's approved list, or a Creative Commons license "that includes 'attribution' or places the work in the public domain", plus a Code of Conduct, a link back to Netlify, and a non-commercial project — and Netlify downgrades plans that stop complying, after notice. For a side project, this plus the other free developer tool credits worth having beats squeezing a commercial app into 300 credits.

What Netlify won't tell you

Things I went looking for on Netlify's own pages and could not find, as of 22 August 2026:

A bandwidth allowance in GB for any credit plan — checked the pricing page, pricing.md, how-credits-work, credit-based-pricing-plans and the billing FAQ. A build-minute allowance, which isn't merely unpublished but abolished: "Build minutes are not calculated as their own metric in our Credit-based pricing plans." A function invocation allowance, checked on the same credit pages plus the functions billing doc. An edge function invocation allowance. Enterprise pricing or its credit allotment.

Also: the four higher Pro tier prices on the pricing page, which exist only in the docs. A guaranteed support response time for Free, Personal or Pro — only Enterprise can buy Business Day or Premium Support with response times attached. A quantified fair-use threshold for the free tier, since on credit plans the credit hard limit is the fair-use mechanism. And the price of one pre-launch-toolbar AI audit, a feature that shipped on 19 August 2026 with a changelog note saying audits "consume credits like any other agent run" and no rate anywhere.

A closing note for anyone pulling these numbers with an agent. Netlify publishes an llms.txt index and a Markdown twin of every page, including netlify.com/pricing.md, which is genuinely useful and the reason llms.txt is worth shipping on your own site. One trap: that file's last_updated front-matter field is generated when you fetch it, not when the content changed. Fetching it on 19 August returned 2026-08-19T18:18:51.000Z; fetching it on 22 August returned 2026-08-22T13:11:29.000Z. The prices in between did not move. The field tracks your request, not the content, so don't cite it as evidence of when a price last moved.