Member-only story
Five hosts for a small site, compared on the limit that stops you first
None of these run out of bandwidth. They stop on a build quota, a plan migration you cannot undo, a Git permission, or a clause saying your site is the wrong kind of site.
Bandwidth stopped being the interesting number years ago. A static site with a few thousand visitors a month costs any of these companies almost nothing to serve, and they all know it.
What they meter instead is the expensive part: builds, function invocations, and the risk that you are a business using a plan meant for a hobby. Every entry below is a limit I could confirm on 5 September 2026, and in three cases the one that bites has nothing to do with how popular your site is.
How this was checked
I deployed this site eight times in one afternoon while adding a database to it, and the free tier stopped me twice for reasons that had nothing to do with traffic. Netlify would not attach its Postgres product without migrating the account to a credit-based plan first, with a checkbox confirming the move cannot be reversed. Two builds later, secret scanning failed the build because a project URL appeared in a README, which is a rule I would keep and had to…
