Netlify Pricing and Limits in 2026: Free Plan, Credits, and What You Actually Get

Netlify switched to credit-based pricing in September 2025, and honestly, it confused me at first. The old model was straightforward — you got 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes. Now everything runs on "credits," which is one of those abstractions that sounds simple until you try to figure out what you're actually getting.

I've spent a bunch of time digging through the numbers, so here's what I've figured out.

The four plans

| | Free | Personal | Pro | Enterprise | |---|---|---|---|---| | Price | $0/month | $9/month | $20/member/month | Custom | | Credits/month | 300 | 1,000 | 3,000 per team | Custom | | Concurrent builds | 1 | 1 | 3 | Custom | | Team members | 1 | 1 | Unlimited ($20 each) | Custom | | Observability | 1 day | 7 days | 30 days | Full | | Function log retention | 24 hours | 7 days | 7 days | Full | | Support | Community | Priority email | Priority email | 24/7 |

How credits actually work

Credits are a unified currency for everything you do on Netlify. Here's what each action costs:

| Action | Credit cost | |---|---| | Production deploy | 15 credits | | Bandwidth | 10 credits per GB | | Compute (functions, SSR) | 5 credits per GB-hour | | Form submission | 1 credit | | Web requests | 3 credits per 10,000 requests |

What does 300 free credits actually get you?

This is where it gets interesting. Let me run through a few scenarios:

Small static site: 10 deploys (150 credits) + 10 GB bandwidth (100 credits) + a handful of form submissions (15 credits) = 265 credits. Plenty of room.
Active blog: 20 deploys (300 credits) = you've burned all your credits on deploys alone, with nothing left for bandwidth. That's tight.
Medium traffic site: 5 deploys (75 credits) + 20 GB bandwidth (200 credits) = 275 credits. Workable, but you're watching every deploy.

The thing that caught me off guard: deploys are expensive at 15 credits each. If you're the kind of person who pushes every small fix immediately, you'll hit the limit fast.

What happens when you run out

On the free plan, your sites get paused. They just stop serving traffic until the next billing cycle. Netlify does warn you at 50%, 75%, and 100% usage, so it shouldn't be a total surprise.

On paid plans, there's an auto-recharge option (off by default). When you turn it on, extra credits get purchased automatically:

Personal: $5 per 500 additional credits
Pro: $10 per 1,500 additional credits

If auto-recharge is off, paid plan sites also pause. I'd recommend keeping an eye on your usage either way.

Bandwidth under the new model

Under the old pricing, bandwidth was its own thing — 100 GB/month on the free plan, simple. Now bandwidth is just another credit cost at 10 credits per GB.

With 300 free credits, your effective bandwidth depends entirely on how many credits you've already spent on deploys. If you used 150 credits on deploys, you've got 150 left — that's 15 GB of bandwidth.

Everything served to visitors counts: HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, media files, even API responses from Netlify Functions. An image-heavy site with 2 MB average page weight serving 10,000 visitors eats roughly 20 GB — that's 200 credits just on bandwidth.

Deploys replaced build minutes

The old model tracked build minutes separately. Now you pay 15 credits per production deploy, regardless of build time. A 30-second build and a 10-minute build cost the same.

This is simpler to reason about, but I actually liked the old build minutes model better for projects with fast builds. If your Next.js build takes 8 minutes, the flat rate is a better deal. If you're deploying a static HTML site that builds in 5 seconds, you're paying the same 15 credits either way.

Ways to reduce deploy costs

Turn off auto-deploy for branches you don't need — this is the easiest win
Be selective with deploy previews — each one costs credits too
Batch your changes instead of pushing every tiny fix
Test locally with the Netlify CLI before deploying

Functions and compute

Serverless functions (SSR, scheduled functions, background functions) cost 5 credits per GB-hour. For a typical small site with a contact form handler or a couple API routes, this is negligible.

Where it gets expensive: API-heavy Next.js or Remix apps doing SSR on every request. If that's you, keep an eye on the compute line in your billing dashboard.

Forms

Netlify Forms cost 1 credit per submission. Honestly, that's cheap — on the free plan you could handle 300 submissions if that's all you used credits for.

The real danger is spam. Bots can burn through your credit allowance overnight. Always set up honeypot fields, reCAPTCHA, or Netlify's built-in spam filtering. I learned this one the hard way.

If you're still on a legacy plan

Accounts created before September 4, 2025 might still have the old pricing with separate bandwidth (100 GB) and build minute (300 min) limits.

One important thing: switching to credit-based pricing is permanent. You can't switch back. Before you migrate, do the math and see which model works better for your actual usage patterns.

Keeping track of usage

The Netlify dashboard has a usage breakdown under Team settings > Billing > Usage. You can see credits consumed by category — deploys, bandwidth, compute, forms. Check it periodically so you're not surprised at the end of the month.

You can also keep tabs on your deploys and build status from your phone with the Netli.fyi app, which is handy if you want a quick glance without opening the dashboard.

Which plan should you pick?

| Use case | Recommended plan | |---|---| | Personal blog or portfolio | Free (300 credits) | | Small business or startup site | Personal ($9/month, 1,000 credits) | | Agency or team with multiple sites | Pro ($20/member, 3,000 credits) | | High-traffic production apps | Enterprise (custom) |

My rule of thumb: if you're deploying more than 15 times a month and getting any real traffic, you'll outgrow the free plan pretty quickly. The $9/month Personal plan is a solid upgrade — more than triple the credits for the cost of a fancy coffee.