Netlify Free plan limits in 2026: 300 credits, one member, one build at a time

The Netlify Free plan is not a bundle of build minutes and gigabytes in 2026; it is a single budget of 300 usage credits a month. Every billable resource draws from that one number, so the answer to "how much can I run for free" is a division problem rather than a list of allowances. At the published rates, 300 credits buys about 20 production deploys, about 15 GB of bandwidth, about 30 GB-hours of compute or about 1.5 million web requests. The table below keeps those conversions in one place so you can see which limit your project will hit first.

What the Free plan covers

The dollar column is Netlify's own conversion, taken from the credits-to-USD calculator that prices everything at the Pro credit-pack rate of $10 per 1,500 credits. The per-credit figure that comes out of that is $0.00667, and it is the number to use whenever you compare a Netlify line item with a competitor's list price.

What the 300-credit cap actually means

The tightest limit on Free is rarely bandwidth. It is deploys: 15 credits each means a repository that pushes to production 20 times in a month consumes the entire allowance and has nothing left for traffic. A team that ships daily crosses that line in under three weeks, and the pause that follows is account-wide — Netlify pauses every project on the account, not just the one that ran out.

The second surprise is that compute and bandwidth share the budget. Functions, Agent Runners and Netlify Database compute all bill at 10 credits per GB-hour, so a function that idles warm for a month at 0.5 GB will burn through credits even when nobody visits the site. There is no separate functions allowance to fall back on.

Free also cannot be topped up. Netlify sells extra credits as add-ons, but the pack table attaches 500 credits to Personal and 1,500 to Pro, and auto-recharge is off by default on paid plans. On Free the only lever is waiting for the next billing cycle.

How we measured it

Both Netlify pages were fetched on 2026-10-25: the rendered pricing page at netlify.com/pricing and its markdown twin at netlify.com/pricing.md, which carries the credit-cost table and the credits-to-USD calculator in plain text. No benchmark, load test or billing experiment was run — every figure here is either copied from those two pages or divided out of them, and every derived number is marked as calculated. Where the page publishes no rate, such as the credit cost of a form submission, this article says so instead of guessing.

What changes in practice

The 24-hour log window is the limit that hurts after the fact. Observability on Free is not part of the plan, Personal adds 1 day and Pro adds 7 days, so an incident that starts on a Friday is effectively undebuggable by Monday on Free. If you run anything with a login form, budget for Personal just to keep logs.

One concurrent build is a queue, not a failure. Two pushes in a row serialize, and a monorepo with three apps builds them one after another. Pro raises the count to 3 and then charges $40 for each additional concurrent build, which is a per-slot fee rather than a per-minute fee — the economics only make sense if slow builds are actually blocking deploys.

One member is the quiet limit on agency work. Git Contributors are free and unlimited on public repositories, and Reviewers never consume a seat, so the single-member cap mostly blocks a second developer who needs deploy rights. That is when a $20 Pro plan shows up on a card, not a bandwidth bill.

Bottom line

Free is a real $0 tier for a site that deploys weekly and serves under about 15 GB a month, and it fails predictably once either of those numbers moves. When it does, skip Personal: $20 for 3,000 credits works out to $0.00667 per credit against Personal's $0.009, so Pro is about 26 percent cheaper per credit and throws in the extra seats (calculated 2026-10-25).