Frontend & Jamstack hosting, in detail
Git-push-to-deploy hosting is a commodity; bandwidth billing is not. After 2024's viral overage stories and 2025's pricing-model churn, the sane comparison is: what happens to your bill when a page goes viral, and what does a build minute cost. Two hosts from the long tail join the overview five here.
| Tool | Free tier | Entry price | Billing unit | Watch out for | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers + Pages | Unlimited static bandwidth; 100k req/day Workers | Workers Paid $5/mo | Flat + per-request | Pages is frozen — new projects go to Workers static assets | Bandwidth-heavy sites; escape from overage bills |
| Vercel | 100 GB + 1M invocations (non-commercial) | Pro $20/user/mo + usage | Per seat + usage meters | Hobby tier forbids commercial use; usage meters need watching | Best Next.js DX: per-PR previews, edge functions |
| Netlify | 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build min/mo | Pro $20/mo flat | Flat (credits under the hood) | Sept 2025 credit model was unpopular; Apr 2026 flat Pro fixed it | Zero-config Jamstack with the deepest build ecosystem |
| GitHub Pages | ~100 GB/mo soft, public repos | $0 (Team $4 for private) | Free | Static only, ~10 builds/hr, no functions | Docs and project sites at literally zero cost |
| Buddy Dev Cloud | Static hosting in the free plan | Bundled (Pro €29/mo) | Part of the platform plan | Hosting is the companion to the pipeline, not a standalone CDN | Own the build, choose the host — pipeline can serve or ship anywhere |
| Render (static) | 100 GB bandwidth free | Paid instances from ~$7/mo | Per instance + per seat | Free dynamic services sleep after 15 min idle | Static hosting that grows into a full-stack platform |
| Firebase Hosting | Spark allowance (storage + daily transfer) | Blaze pay-as-you-go | Per GB stored/served | Runaway-bill folklore applies to all of Blaze | Web apps already inside the Firebase ecosystem |
Pricing models and free tiers change often — check each vendor for current terms. Compiled July 2026; the most volatile figures verified on official pricing pages.
Official pages: Cloudflare Workers + Pages · Vercel · Netlify · GitHub Pages · Render (static) · Firebase Hosting
Entry price at a glance
Cheapest paid plan, USD per month — per-user plans shown for a single seat. Hatched bars are usage-based or quote-only; values marked ~ are approximate.
Notes & recent changes
- Netlify's Feb 2024 incident — a $104k bandwidth bill from a DDoS on a free site — is the canonical overage story; its Apr 2026 flat $20 Pro with unlimited members is the correction.
- Cloudflare steers new projects from Pages to Workers with static assets (since Sept 2024); static requests stay free either way.
- Vercel's Fluid compute (Feb 2025) cut function costs meaningfully; the per-seat + usage model still needs a budget alert on day one.
Which one should you pick?
- Any risk of viral traffic → Cloudflare (unmetered static).
- Next.js team that values preview DX → Vercel.
- Want a flat, predictable bill → Netlify Pro.
- Docs/OSS → GitHub Pages. Build in CI and want the host optional → Buddy Dev Cloud.