Is Netlify actually free, and what does the free tier include

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Netlify's free plan, as of October 2026, is $0 a month with no time limit, and no credit card required to start. You can see the current free plan details on Netlify's own pricing page and sign up without committing to anything paid.

What the free plan genuinely includes

Every Netlify plan, including the free one, gets the same core features. The thing that changes between plans is the size of your monthly credit allowance and how many people can work on the site, not which features you can access.

• 300 credits a month: This is Netlify's usage currency, drawn down by production deploys (15 credits each), compute (10 credits per GB-hour), bandwidth (20 credits per GB), and web requests (2 credits per 10,000 requests).
• Unlimited deploy previews: Every branch or pull request gets its own live preview URL, with no cap on how many you create.
• Custom domains with free SSL: Point your own domain at Netlify and get an SSL certificate automatically, no extra charge.
• Serverless functions: Small bits of backend code, like a contact form handler or a simple API call, run without you needing to manage a server.
• Structured data storage and blob storage: Netlify's own built-in database for structured data, and storage for files and images, both available on the free plan.
• Deploy from Git, AI, or an API: Push code from a Git repository, use an AI agent through Netlify's dashboard, or deploy programmatically.

This is a genuinely useful set of features for a free plan. A lot of hosts gate deploy previews, functions, or custom domains behind a paid tier. Netlify doesn't.

Can you actually use the free plan for a real business?

Yes. Netlify's free plan doesn't carry the kind of "personal projects only, no commercial use" restriction that some competing free tiers attach. The limiting factor on Netlify's free plan is purely usage volume (your 300 monthly credits) and team size (Free is an individual plan, not built for multiple collaborators), not what kind of site you're running on it. A small business marketing site, a portfolio, or a landing page is exactly the kind of thing the free plan is built for.

When the free tier genuinely stops being enough

Two things push you off the free plan in practice.

• You use more than 300 credits in a month: This happens from a combination of deploy frequency, bandwidth, and compute. A low-traffic site with occasional deploys rarely hits this. A site getting real daily traffic, deploying frequently, or running several serverless functions can use up its allowance before the month resets.
• You need more than one person working on the site: Free and Personal are both single-person plans. The moment a second team member needs their own access to collaborate, you need Pro at $20 a month, which includes unlimited team members.

Neither of these is a feature Netlify is hiding from you to force an upgrade. They're genuinely usage-based limits, and you can watch your actual credit consumption in Netlify's dashboard before you ever hit them.

When to upgrade, and to what

If you're a solo site owner who occasionally exceeds 300 credits but doesn't need a team, Personal at $9 a month with 1,000 credits is the natural next step. If you need another person collaborating on the site regardless of usage volume, Pro at $20 a month is the right move, since it's the first tier with unlimited team members, and it also triples your credit allowance to 3,000. My full Netlify pricing breakdown walks through worked examples at a few different site sizes if you want a more specific estimate than "watch your usage."

How this compares to other free hosting options

Netlify's free plan is more generous than most in terms of features (deploy previews, functions, and a database, all included free), but a genuinely static site with extremely low traffic and no need for any of those extras can go even cheaper: GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are both free with essentially no meaningful usage limit for a small site, though you give up deploy previews, serverless functions, and Netlify's built-in storage. My Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages vs GitHub Pages comparison goes through that tradeoff directly if cost is your only concern.

The honest bottom line

If you're starting a small business site and don't yet know your real traffic or deploy pattern, start on Netlify's free plan. It's not a trial, there's no feature tax to get the basics working, and you can watch your actual usage for a few weeks before deciding whether a paid plan or a different host entirely makes more sense. Netlify's pricing page is the place to check the current numbers before you commit either way, since usage-based pricing is exactly the kind of thing that's worth confirming live rather than trusting an older figure.

A worked example: a real small site

Say you're running a five-page marketing site for a local service business. You deploy a handful of times a month as you tweak copy or add a page, maybe eight production deploys (8 x 15 = 120 credits). Traffic is modest, a few hundred visits a week, so bandwidth lands somewhere around 3 to 5GB a month (call it 4GB x 20 = 80 credits). You're not running heavy serverless functions, so compute stays minimal. That's roughly 200 credits of your 300 monthly allowance, with headroom left over. This is the realistic shape of a free-plan site: not zero usage, but comfortably inside the limit without watching it nervously.

Compare that to a site that deploys daily during an active redesign (30 deploys = 450 credits) or one that suddenly gets picked up by a local news story and spikes to 20GB of traffic in a week (400 credits). Either of those alone would exceed the free plan's monthly allowance on its own, which is exactly the kind of moment a top-up pack or a move to Personal or Pro becomes the right call rather than a sign something's gone wrong.

How to actually watch your usage

Netlify's dashboard shows your credit consumption broken down by category (deploys, bandwidth, compute, AI inference) rather than just a single running total. Check it weekly for the first month on a new site rather than waiting for a surprise at the end of a billing cycle. If one category is climbing faster than you expected, for example AI inference from heavy Agent Runners use, you can address that specific habit directly instead of guessing at what's driving your total usage up.

Is free the right choice for a site you genuinely depend on?

There's a separate question worth asking beyond cost: is it wise to run your actual business's main website on a free plan at all? The honest answer is that Netlify's free plan isn't a lesser-quality version of its paid plans in terms of reliability. Your site gets the same global CDN, the same automatic SSL, and the same uptime infrastructure regardless of which plan it's on. The free plan's limits are purely about usage volume and collaborator count, not a weaker version of the hosting itself. That said, a business that depends entirely on its website for leads or sales is usually better served by having a small amount of headroom above whatever its actual usage is, simply so a traffic spike from a good marketing push doesn't coincide with running low on monthly credits at an inconvenient moment.