Vercel

Cloud platform for deploying static sites and web apps with Git integration, preview deployments and serverless functions.

Always free
Non-commercial only
No card required

Free tier

Hobby plan with 100 GB Fast Data Transfer and 1M CDN requests per month, for personal non-commercial use only.

100 GB Fast Data Transfer per month
10 GB Fast Origin Transfer per month
1,000,000 CDN requests per month
1,000,000 function invocations per month
4 CPU-hours Active CPU and 360 GB-hours provisioned memory per month
5,000 image transformations per month
100 deployments per day
200 projects
1 concurrent build, 45 minutes max per build
100 MB max source upload per CLI deployment

Gotchas

Hobby is restricted to non-commercial personal use; Vercel counts ads, taking payments, affiliate-focused sites and being paid to build or host the site as commercial.
Going over a Hobby limit pauses that usage, generally until 30 days have passed; Hobby can't buy extra usage.
Hobby projects can't connect to Git repositories owned by a Git organization.
CLI deployments are limited to 100 MB of source files on Hobby and 15,000 source files.
Use plain vercel login (OAuth device flow); the email and --github/--gitlab/--bitbucket login variants were retired on 2026-02-26.

Setup

What you do

Sign up at https://vercel.com/signup and use the free Hobby plan.
Approve the device login in the browser when the agent runs vercel login, or create an access token.

How your agent gets access

CLI login

Install

npm i -g vercel

Run

vercel login

OAuth device flow; the human approves in any browser.

API key

Install

npm i -g vercel

Get it at

vercel.com/account/settings/tokens

Env var

VERCEL_TOKEN

The CLI reads VERCEL_TOKEN (or --token); set VERCEL_ORG_ID and VERCEL_PROJECT_ID to skip vercel link in CI.

Check it worked

vercel whoami

Optional: start without an account

Creates a temporary resource before you have an account, for trying things out. The steps above are the normal path.

Run

vercel deploy --temporary

Expires

Set by Vercel and printed by the CLI; the launch announcement said one hour.

To keep it

Open the claim URL the CLI prints, then run vercel login to keep deploying.

Only works with no stored Vercel credentials, and not in CI or in a directory already linked to a Vercel project. Anyone with the claim link can take the project.