Teams using Vercel's free Hobby plan will now see older, unprotected deployments wiped out right away if they cross the 10GB Deployment Storage ceiling, according to an announcement this week from the platform provider. Previously, users on the no-cost tier could rely on eligible deployments staying available for as long as 30 days, but that grace period has disappeared for teams beyond the limit. Vercel's updated Deployment Retention Policy also tightens protections across all Hobby projects, reducing the number of deployments that survive automatic deletion.
Under the new rules, each Hobby project will retain only the three most recent production deployments, plus its three most recent deployments of any kind, no matter how old they are. That's a sharp drop from the earlier Hobby exception, which preserved the 10 most recent production deployments, and it applies to every Hobby project whether they've hit the 10GB cap or not. Preview deployments lost a separate safeguard as well: the count-based exception that gave Pro and Enterprise teams protection for their last 20 non-production deployments in a Ready state no longer covers Hobby users. The latest preview deployment on an active Git branch still gets protection on every plan, but the broader count-based shield is gone for the free tier.
Jas Garcha, head of pricing at Vercel, tells The New Stack the policy shift is necessary to keep the Hobby tier workable as deployment volumes surge. "This change allows us to continue supporting a Hobby community that's deploying at a much higher rate than it was a year ago," Garcha says. Vercel now processes more than 10 million deployments every single day, which represents more than a sixfold jump compared to the same period last year, according to Garcha. The company's earlier retention defaults were built for teams shipping constantly and needing extensive rollback history, he explains, but they made less sense for Hobby projects where dormant deployments quietly ate up storage that active projects need.
Garcha says the stricter policy helps Vercel maintain Hobby as a permanent free option rather than a trial or expiring credit. "We're one of the few platforms where the free tier isn't a trial or a credit that expires. It's a permanent plan, and we've kept expanding it," he tells The New Stack. By making sure resources flow to people actively building, the company can keep offering the tier indefinitely. Deletion isn't immediately permanent: Vercel gives successfully built deployments a 30-day recovery window, and users can restore them from a project's Settings under Security → Recently Deleted. Hobby users who want to prevent old, unprotected deployments from being deleted altogether can shift to the Pro plan, where storage beyond the included allowance costs $0.10 per GB-month and retention exceptions remain far more generous. For those staying on Hobby, Vercel offers guidance for optimizing Deployment Storage usage to help users stay under the free 10GB limit, like cutting unnecessary deployment output. Garcha says the vast majority of Hobby users won't notice the change, and current production deployments are never deleted, with aliased and active-branch deployments staying protected along with each project's most recent deployments. The platform's bet is that targeting dormant storage frees up capacity for active builders without pushing most free-tier users toward a paid plan. That calculus may hold if deployment growth continues to outpace storage cleanup, but it also signals that even permanent free tiers have elastic boundaries when usage patterns shift faster than infrastructure costs allow.