“Dormant deployments were quietly consuming storage”: Why Vercel tightened its free-tier rules

Vercel announced this week that teams on its free Hobby plan will now have older, unprotected deployments deleted immediately if they exceed the 10GB Deployment Storage limit.

When asked why Vercel decided to change its retention rules, Jas Garcha, head of pricing at Vercel, tells The New Stack the update is a move to keep the free tier viable amid rapidly growing deployment volumes:

“This change allows us to continue supporting a Hobby community that’s deploying at a much higher rate than it was a year ago.”

Old deployments now deleted immediately

Before, users in the free tier could count on eligible deployments to stick around for up to 30 days. But that window is gone for teams over the limit, and the protections that used to spare older deployments have narrowed for every Hobby project.

Now, if users exceed the standard 10GB of Deployment Storage included on the free tier, old deployments not covered by Vercel’s retention-policy exceptions will be deleted immediately, per Vercel’s updated Deployment Retention Policy.

“This change allows us to continue supporting a Hobby community that’s deploying at a much higher rate than it was a year ago.”

What gets to stay?

Vercel says each Hobby project will keep the three most recent production deployments, along with its three most recent deployments of any type, regardless of age. That’s a cut from the previous Hobby exception, which preserved the 10 most recent production deployments, and it applies to every Hobby project — not only teams over the 10GB limit.

Plus, preview deployments lose a separate protection

In addition to cutting the 30-day holding period for over-limit teams, Vercel’s policy update also removes a separate retention exception for preview deployments.

Preview deployments have not vanished from Vercel’s exception list entirely — the latest preview deployment on an active Git branch is still protected on every plan. What Hobby lost is the count-based exception: Pro and Enterprise teams keep their last 20 non-production deployments in a Ready state, and that protection no longer applies to Hobby.

Per Garcha, “Your current production deployment is never deleted, and aliased and active-branch deployments remain protected, along with each project’s most recent deployments.”

Why the change?

Garcha tells The New Stack that Vercel’s latest policy update is needed to keep the Hobby tier sustainable as deployment volumes dramatically rise:

“Our former retention defaults were designed for teams that ship constantly and need deep rollback history. They made less sense for Hobby projects, where dormant deployments were quietly consuming storage that active projects need.”

“Your current production deployment is never deleted, and aliased and active-branch deployments remain protected, along with each project’s most recent deployments.”

And activity is much higher, even compared to a year ago. According to Garcha, Vercel now handles more than 10 million deployments every day— more than a 6x increase YoY. Immediately deleting older, unprotected deployments, Garcha says, is one way to free up storage for active projects as Vercel handles much higher deployment rates.

In other words, Vercel is moving out some of the old to make room for the new. It describes how the storage limit works in its post:

“Every deployment you keep uses some of it [Deployment Storage], and going over the limit can block you from deploying until you free some up.”

What Hobby users should do

It’s important to note that deletion isn’t immediately permanent. Vercel gives successfully built deployments a 30-day recovery period, and users can restore them from a project’s Settings, under Security → Recently Deleted. Hobby users who want to stop old, unprotected deployments from being deleted in the first place can move off the free tier and onto the Pro plan. In the Pro tier, storage beyond the plan’s included allowance is billed at $0.10 per GB-month, and the retention exceptions stay far more generous: the last 10 deployments created in a project, the last 20 production deployments in a Ready state, and the last 20 non-production ones.

For users who can’t or don’t want to upgrade to Pro, Vercel offers guidance for optimizing Deployment Storage usage to help users stay under the free 10GB storage limit, like reducing unnecessary deployment output.

Still, Garcha says few Hobby users will feel the effects enough to warrant making a change. Pointing to Vercel’s list of exceptions that still protect certain deployments, he tells The New Stack, “The vast majority of Hobby users won’t notice the change.”

Garcha also says Vercel’s stricter retention policy helps the company keep offering Hobby as a permanent free plan.

“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 says. “By ensuring its resources go to people actively building, we’re able to continue offering it.”

The post appeared first on The New Stack.