How to Cancel Vercel Pro in 2026 (The $20/Month You Don't Need)

Updated February 2026 • 5 min read

Vercel Pro costs $20/user/month. For a solo developer, that's $240/year for hosting that's free on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Railway. Here's when Pro is worth keeping, when it's not, and how to downgrade.

How to Downgrade/Cancel Vercel Pro

Go to vercel.com/dashboard
Click Settings → Billing
Click "Downgrade to Hobby"
Review what you'll lose (see list below)
Confirm downgrade
Your sites keep running — no downtime during transition

Hobby vs Pro: What You Actually Lose

Bandwidth: 100GB/month (Hobby) vs 1TB (Pro) — most sites use under 20GB
Build minutes: 6,000/month (Hobby) vs 24,000 (Pro) — most projects use under 1,000
Serverless execution: 100GB-hrs (Hobby) vs 1,000GB-hrs (Pro)
Team members: 1 (Hobby) vs unlimited (Pro)
Password protection: Pro only
Spend management alerts: Pro only
Preview deployments: Both tiers
Custom domains: Both tiers
SSL: Both tiers
Edge Functions: Both tiers

✅ Reality check: Unless you're getting over 100GB bandwidth/month (~1M+ page views) or working with a team, Hobby covers everything you need. Most side projects and even small SaaS apps never hit Hobby limits.

When Pro Is Actually Worth It

Team projects: Multiple developers need dashboard access
High traffic: Consistently over 100GB bandwidth/month
Heavy serverless: API routes handling thousands of requests/day
Password-protected previews: Client work that needs secure staging
DDoS protection: Pro includes Vercel Firewall WAF

Cheaper Alternatives to Vercel

Cloudflare Pages (free) — Unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, Workers for serverless. Best free tier in the industry
Netlify (free tier) — 100GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes, serverless functions included
Railway ($5/mo) — Full-stack hosting with databases, more flexible than Vercel
Render (free tier) — Static site hosting is free, web services start at $7/mo
Fly.io ($0/mo to start) — Docker-based, great for full-stack apps
Self-hosted on VPS ($5/mo) — DigitalOcean/Hetzner droplet with Coolify or Dokku

The Vercel Pricing Surprise

Vercel's biggest controversy is usage-based billing on Pro. While Hobby has hard limits (site goes offline), Pro has soft limits with overage charges. Stories of developers getting $500+ bills after a traffic spike are common on Reddit and Hacker News. If you stay on Pro, set up spend management alerts immediately. If you downgrade to Hobby, you're protected by hard limits — your site pauses instead of billing you.

Next.js Without Vercel

Vercel makes Next.js and wants you to think you need Vercel to host Next.js. You don't. Next.js runs on any Node.js server. Cloudflare Pages supports Next.js via their adapter. Netlify has first-class Next.js support. You can even run next start on a $5 VPS. Don't confuse the framework with the hosting platform.

Bottom line: Vercel Pro is a convenience tax. The Hobby tier handles most projects, and Cloudflare Pages offers unlimited bandwidth for free. Unless you need team features or handle serious traffic, downgrade and save $240/year. Your Next.js app doesn't care where it's hosted.

Find More Subscriptions to Cancel →

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Quick Cancel Guide: Vercel Pro

Direct cancel link + step-by-step instructions