100 GB of static traffic in 2026: $20 on Netlify against $14.25 on Render

A static site has one cost that scales with success and almost nothing else: outbound bandwidth. Two platforms that both host static sites for free price that gigabyte very differently, and the differences only appear once a site is popular. On Netlify, bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB against a hard 300-credit free cap, so 100 GB of traffic needs the $20 Pro plan. On Render it costs $0.15 per GB after 5 GB included, so the same 100 GB bills $14.25 on the free Hobby workspace. Cheaper is not the whole story, because one of these platforms stops serving at the limit and the other sends an invoice.

100 GB on each platform

The Netlify column is not a price list, it is a plan ladder. Credits are sold in blocks, so the bill jumps from $0 to $9 to $20 as traffic crosses 15 GB and then 50 GB, and the credits paid for but unused at each tier are not refunded.

What the credit ladder actually means

Netlify replaced per-resource limits with credits, and bandwidth is the most expensive of its meters at 20 credits per GB. The Free plan's 300 credits therefore buy exactly 15 GB of traffic and nothing else — no deploys, no function compute, no web requests. A site sitting at 15 GB of traffic on the Free plan has used its entire allowance on bandwidth alone, which is the point where the free tier ends.

What happens at that point differs more than the prices do. Netlify's Free plan has hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded, and crossing a project's limit pauses all projects on the account until the next billing cycle. Render's Hobby plan includes 5 GB and then bills $0.15 per GB with no cap, so the site keeps serving and the owner discovers the overage later. One model fails closed, the other fails open and expensive.

Render's 5 GB is smaller than Netlify's 15 GB, but it is a billing threshold rather than a wall. For a site with steady traffic the second model is easier to live with; for a site that might be linked from somewhere large, the first model is a hard stop that costs nothing.

How we measured it

Both pricing pages were fetched on 2026-10-25. Netlify's page supplies the 20-credits-per-GB rate, the 300-credit Free cap, the 1,000-credit Personal plan at $9 and the 3,000-credit Pro plan at $20; Render's supplies the 5 GB Hobby allowance and the $0.15 per GB overage. Every dollar figure in the table is arithmetic on those rates at the stated traffic levels, and no site was deployed or measured on either platform.

What changes in practice

The credits are shared across every meter, so bandwidth competes with everything else the project does. A Netlify site that uses 10 GB of traffic has spent 200 of its 300 credits and has 5 GB left for deploys, function compute and web requests — 15 production deploys at 15 credits each would exhaust the remainder before the traffic did. The true free ceiling is lower than 15 GB for any project that also deploys.

Render's allowance is shared too, but only with traffic. Build minutes are metered separately at 500 a month on Hobby, and compute is priced per instance, so the 5 GB is genuinely 5 GB of traffic. That makes Render's free tier easier to reason about even though its number is smaller.

Large traffic inverts the comparison. At 500 GB, Render's overage alone is $74.25, while Netlify needs one of the 10,000-credit Pro tiers, about $66.67 at the page's own credit pack rate of $10 per 1,500 credits (calculated 2026-10-25). Neither is cheap, and at that volume a CDN in front of an object store is the conversation worth having.

Bottom line

For a static site under 100 GB a month, Render is the cheaper host at $14.25 against $20, and it is the safer one if traffic is unpredictable because it bills instead of pausing. Choose Netlify only if the 15 GB free tier covers the site, since past that point its credit ladder costs more per gigabyte than Render's flat $0.15 (calculated 2026-10-25).