Netlify pricing change is a disaster
WTF… Netlify pricing change from September 5, 2025 essentially means that people can only build & deploy a static website 20 times in a month on their “Free” tier. Previously it was limited based on ~300 minutes of build time, but now the whole thing is super cut down to only 20 builds a month.
“Production deploys: 15 credits” (per deploy!) Free tier has 300 credits per month, so that means: 300 / 15 = 20 builds per month.
It is understandable that they want to finally monetize the free tier projects, but hey, that is a massive feature lockdown compared to the previous pricing. Essentially they are throwing away most of the hobbyist users, as even the “Personal” pricing plan (starting at $9/month) has only 1,000 credits. Thousand credits allow to make ~66 deploys of their website, essentially pushing the total costs way way more higher than before.
“Personal” plan deploys (monthly credits divided by the amount of credits cost per deploy): 1000 / 15 = 66.66 deploys, rounded down to ~66 deploys per month.
Essentially that means Netlify is now officially too expensive for most home users. It seems that they are trying to push the whole platform towards the corporate and enterprise customers, while practically dropping most of the hobbyists from their services. That is a bad move overall, as Netlify had been a great starting point for a whole generation of new web developers. So where do web developers now migrate their deployment processes to? No idea, at the moment, since there is a limited amount of direct competitors (with similar level of product usability).
Even while they allow current customers to stay on a “legacy plan with no action required”, it doesn’t feel that stable pathway in the long run. Eventually they will add more usage limits for the free tier projects, one way or another. Instant changes are not required (yet!), but this is something to keep in mind, as people have to prepare enough time for moving their websites and applications away from the deployment & hosting platform.