On 8 September 2026, Vercel made Flat Rate CDN generally available for Pro teams. The interesting part is not the feature. It is the reason they gave for building it, and who gave it.
In their announcement, a beta customer described CDN costs as "by far our largest line item, and the hardest to forecast." Not the most expensive. The hardest to forecast. Vercel's own summary of what changes is "No overages: Your bill will never increase because of temporary usage spikes."
That is the company that helped normalise usage-based billing for frontend infrastructure saying, in its customers' words, that the problem with usage-based billing is that you cannot predict it.
What Vercel actually shipped
To be precise, because this is easy to get wrong: Flat Rate CDN is a cheaper, more predictable option, not a price increase. It is a new option being added alongside the existing model, and anyone reading it as a price increase has the story backwards.
From the changelog: it is generally available for Pro teams, it gives you "a fixed monthly bill", and "New Pro teams have Flat Rate CDN on by default, and existing teams can switch over in Billing settings." Pro includes "1M requests and 1 TB of data transfer". Spike protection is on by default — traffic above your tier's capacity is "served normally, without degraded performance, and isn't billed (subject to the fair use guidelines)".
The clearest illustration is in their blog post. Yasuyuki Matsumoto of Newt Travel: "We enabled Flat Rate CDN around the same time we launched a TV campaign. Under the old model, we would have been closely monitoring CDN-related costs. With Flat Rate CDN, we no longer have to worry." Vercel adds that on usage-based pricing that campaign's CDN bill "would have reached tens of thousands of dollars", and that on Flat Rate CDN "it stayed at $20 for the month".
Read that as a description of the old model rather than a swipe at it. A TV campaign is exactly the event you build a website for. Under metered billing, it is also the event you watch a dashboard through.
This is a pattern, not an incident
Three weeks earlier, on 18 August, Netlify removed per-seat pricing — "Pro costs $20/month with unlimited seats" — and in the same post rebalanced the credit meters behind it: bandwidth moved from 10 to 20 credits per GB, compute from 5 to 10 credits per GB-hour, requests from 3 to 2 credits per 10,000, and forms became free. Netlify's own position is that "for 98% of our customers, the monthly bill stays the same or goes down". That is their number and we have no reason to dispute it.
What is worth noticing is the shape. Removing per-seat pricing makes one axis of the bill predictable. The credits underneath still move with what your site does.
On 26 August, DigitalOcean introduced v5 Droplets, where you "select vCPU, memory, and storage independently and pay for only the resources you choose". That announcement publishes no prices, so nobody should tell you DigitalOcean got cheaper or more expensive. The defensible observation is narrower and more useful: buying a server there now involves more decisions than it did. Separately, DigitalOcean changed rates on selected GPU instances effective 1 August. We say changed, deliberately — the before-and-after figures were published as images we could not read reliably, and a direction we cannot verify is not a direction we will state.
The problem is forecasting, not price
Metered billing is not dishonest. It is often genuinely cheaper. But it moves a specific piece of work onto you: at the start of the month you do not know what the month costs, and you cannot know until it ends.
For a solo developer that is an annoyance. For anyone who has to answer "what will this cost?" before a launch, a campaign, or a board meeting, it is a real cost of its own — the monitoring, the alert thresholds, the conversation about whether traffic was good news or a budget problem.
How DeployBase prices
Priced by server size. Not by traffic. You pick a plan, the plan is a server, and the server's size is the price:
| Plan | Per month | RAM | Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $5.99 | 1 GB | 20 GB SSD | 1 TB |
| Pro | $11.99 | 2 GB | 25 GB SSD | 2 TB |
| Business | $23.99 | 4 GB | 50 GB SSD | Unmetered |
| Enterprise | $47.99 | 12 GB | 100 GB SSD | Unmetered |
Billing is monthly and you can cancel any time. Every plan runs WordPress, Laravel, Node.js, PHP or a static site — you choose the stack when you deploy, not when you pick a plan. SSH access and Git deployment start on Pro; a staging environment starts on Business.
The part most pricing pages leave out
Starter and Pro have a bandwidth allowance — 1 TB and 2 TB. It is worth being exact about what happens if you cross it, because "no traffic charges" can be read as a promise that traffic never matters.
We do not bill you for the overage. We suspend the account until the next cycle or until you move up a plan. That is a real limit and a real trade-off: you will never receive a surprise invoice from us, and you can be taken offline by your own success on the two smallest plans. Business and Enterprise are unmetered.
We would rather write that down than let you discover it. A pricing model you can predict is only worth something if the limits are published alongside the price.
What we would actually suggest
Not "switch to us". The useful question, whoever you host with, is whether you can answer this before the month starts: what will this cost if the site does well?
If the answer requires a dashboard, that is fine — plenty of good teams run that way, and Vercel's new option exists precisely so they do not have to. But it is worth knowing that you are paying for that forecasting work somewhere, usually in attention.
If you want the version where the answer is on the pricing page, that is what we sell. Plans start at $5.99/month at deploybase.io.