Netlify Free Plan Limits in 2026: Credits, Bandwidth, Builds

If you signed up for Netlify recently, the free plan doesn't work the way most blog posts describe. There are no separate "build minutes" and "bandwidth" buckets anymore. New accounts get 300 credits a month with a hard limit, and every action you take spends from that one pool.

I run a few small sites on the free plan and got caught out by this, so here's the actual picture, verified against the Netlify docs on July 3, 2026.

What does the Netlify free plan include in 2026?

The free plan gives you 300 credits per month, and that's a hard limit — you can't buy more or go into overage. When the credits run out, every site on your team is paused and visitors get a Site not available page until the next billing cycle resets.

Here's what things cost out of that 300-credit budget:

| What you do | Credit cost | If you spent only on this | | --- | --- | --- | | Production deploy | 15 credits each | ~20 production deploys/month | | Web bandwidth | 20 credits per GB | ~15 GB/month | | Web requests | 2 credits per 10,000 | ~1.5M requests/month | | Compute (functions, etc.) | 10 credits per GB-hour | ~30 GB-hours/month | | Form submissions | Free | Unlimited | | Deploy Previews & branch deploys | Free | Unlimited | | Failed deploys | Free | — |

Those right-hand numbers are "if you spent every credit on one thing" — you won't. A real site splits its 300 credits across deploys, bandwidth, and requests at the same time. Treat them as ceilings, not allowances.

A few things that surprised me: form submissions are free and unlimited on credit plans now (they used to cap at 100/site/month), and failed deploys and rollbacks don't cost anything. You only pay the 15 credits when a production deploy actually succeeds.

How much bandwidth does the Netlify free plan include?

Bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB. If you did nothing else, 300 credits would cover about 15 GB of traffic a month. In practice you're also spending credits on deploys and requests, so plan for less.

For a static portfolio or a docs site, 15 GB is plenty. For anything serving images or video to real traffic, this is the limit you'll hit first.

How many build minutes do you get on the free plan?

None — and that's not a bad thing. Build minutes are no longer metered on credit-based plans. Instead, each successful production deploy costs a flat 15 credits regardless of how long the build takes. A build that runs 30 seconds and a build that runs eight minutes cost the same.

The practical limit is deploy count: 300 credits ÷ 15 credits = about 20 production deploys a month if you spent your whole budget on deploys. Deploy Previews and branch deploys are free, so pushing to a feature branch or opening a PR doesn't touch your credits — only merges to production do.

What happens if you go over the free plan limit?

On the free plan, you hit a hard stop. There's no overage bill and no auto-recharge option. Once your team burns through 300 credits, your sites pause and stay down until the monthly cycle resets.

This is the key difference from the paid plans. If you want your site to stay up past the limit, you have to move to Personal ($9/month, 1,000 credits) or Pro ($20/month, 3,000 credits), both of which let you enable auto-recharge to buy more credits automatically.

If you're on an account created before September 4, 2025, you're on a legacy plan with the old model instead: 100 GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes a month, both hard limits on the free tier. You can check which one you're on under Usage & billing > Billing details in your team dashboard.

Watching your usage from your phone. When a runaway build or a traffic spike starts eating credits, you want to know before your sites go dark — not after. Netli.fyi tracks your Netlify usage from your phone, so you can catch it while there's still time to act.

When the free plan is genuinely enough

The free plan is fine, indefinitely, if:

• Your site is static or mostly static, with light traffic (a personal site, a docs site, a small marketing page).
• You merge to production a handful of times a week, not dozens of times a day.
• You don't serve large media files to a lot of visitors.
• You don't need password protection, team members, or email/Slack deploy notifications — all of which are Pro features now.

If you're bumping into the credit ceiling every month, the honest move is Personal or Pro, not fighting the limit. But most small sites never come close.

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I don't work for Netlify, and this isn't official documentation. Numbers verified against docs.netlify.com on July 3, 2026 — Netlify changes pricing, so check your own dashboard for what applies to your account.

Related: Netlify pricing and limits explained · How to fix common Netlify build errors