Hostinger vs Vercel: what a Next.js app actually costs to host

Vercel and Hostinger do not really compete on price. They compete on how you pay. Vercel meters what your app used and sends an invoice; Hostinger sells you a plan and the invoice is the plan. Most of the frustration people report with hosting bills is that difference, not the numbers.

So this comparison does two things. It costs the same Next.js app both ways using each vendor's published rates, and it says plainly where the metered model is worth paying for — because for some apps it clearly is.

Disclosure: we publish this, we host wacrm on Hostinger, and the Hostinger links here are referral links. Every figure below is calculated from the vendors' own pricing pages, checked in August 2026, and the arithmetic is shown so you can check it. Prices change; verify before you buy.

The short version

• Choose Vercel if traffic is spiky, your visitors are spread across continents, or your team lives on preview deployments and instant rollbacks. You are buying a global edge network and a release workflow, and it is a good one.
• Choose Hostinger if you want the hosting line in your budget to be a number you chose. A managed Node.js plan is $3.99/month on term ($16.99 at renewal) and runs five apps with unlimited bandwidth, real cron, and a persistent Node process.
• The floor matters more than the ceiling. Vercel's free Hobby plan is not available for commercial use, so a business app starts at $20/month however quiet it is.

What it costs, both ways

Pick the traffic level that looks like yours. The Vercel column is built from its published Pro rates with the included allowances and the $20 monthly credit applied — the two things most "Vercel is expensive" posts leave out.

The pattern is worth stating out loud: at small and medium size, almost all of a Vercel bill is seats, not usage. Three developers who can each press deploy is $60/month before a single visitor arrives. Usage only takes over once you pass the allowances, and then it moves quickly.

What Vercel meters

Resource	Included on Pro	Rate after that
Deploying seats	1	$20/month each
Fast data transfer	1 TB	from $0.15/GB
Edge requests	10M	from $2.00 per million
Function invocations	—	$0.60 per million
Active CPU	—	from $0.128/hour
Provisioned memory	—	from $0.0106/GB-hour
Build compute	—	$0.0035 per CPU-minute
Image optimization	—	$0.05 per 1,000 transformations
Observability Plus	—	$1.20 per million events

Two footnotes that matter. The "from" prices are the cheapest US region; serving from Frankfurt, Mumbai or São Paulo costs more per unit for the same traffic. And the $20 monthly credit offsets usage only — never the platform fee or seats, and it does not roll over.

None of this is hidden. It is published in detail, which is more than many hosts manage. The problem is not disclosure, it is that eight metered dimensions make next month's bill genuinely hard to predict — and Vercel's own default spend notification sits at $200 per cycle, which tells you something about the range they expect people to land in.

The Hobby plan is not a business option

This is the part most comparisons miss, and it changes the maths more than any unit rate. Vercel's fair use guidelines restrict Hobby teams to non-commercial personal use, and define commercial usage broadly: taking payment, advertising a product or service, being paid to build or host the site, running ads — even asking for donations. All of it requires Pro or Enterprise.

So "Vercel is free" is true for a portfolio and false for a business. The realistic comparison is $20/month against $3.99–7.99/month, before usage.

What the flat plan buys

Beyond the specs in those cards, every plan includes a first-year domain, unlimited SSL certificates, backups, and 24/7 human support. A Git integration builds and deploys from your GitHub repository on push, so the everyday loop is the same one you are used to: commit, push, watch it deploy.

What you are not buying, and should not pretend you are:

• A global edge network. Your app serves from one data centre. Pick the region nearest your users and accept that visitors on the other side of the world will feel it.
• Autoscaling. A traffic spike does not create an overage line; it creates slower responses until you move up a tier. That is a real trade, not a free win.
• Preview deployments per pull request. You get one deployed app per app slot, so staging is a second slot you set up yourself.

Where Vercel is clearly worth it

An honest comparison has to include the cases where you should pay Vercel and stop reading:

• Spiky or unpredictable traffic. Launches, campaigns, anything that can go from a hundred to a hundred thousand visitors in an hour. Autoscaling you do not have to think about is worth real money.
• A globally distributed audience. Serving from the edge in dozens of locations is not something a single shared container can imitate.
• Teams that ship on previews. A URL per pull request, comments on the deployment, one-click rollback — this genuinely changes how a team reviews work, and rebuilding it elsewhere costs more than the subscription.
• Vercel-specific features. Edge Config, skew protection, built-in analytics and observability, the AI SDK integrations. If you use them, you are not comparing hosts; you are comparing a host with a platform.

Where the flat plan wins

• A bill you can forecast. The number is the same every month. For a bootstrapped product or a client site, that is often worth more than a lower average.
• A persistent Node process. A long-running send loop, a queue worker, or a slow import runs in the process instead of being chopped up to fit inside a function's execution limit.
• Ordinary cron, at any interval. On Vercel, cron jobs invoke functions, and the schedule depends on the plan: once per day on Hobby (with up to an hour of slack), once per minute on Pro. On a Node.js plan you get normal cron entries at whatever interval you want.
• Several apps on one plan. Business runs five web apps and 50 websites. On a metered platform every extra project is another set of meters.
• Unlimited bandwidth. Traffic that would cost $161 in transfer overage at 2 TB a month costs nothing extra here. This is the single biggest structural difference between the two models.

Running Next.js on a Node server

Worth being precise, because there is a lot of folklore about this. A managed Node.js plan runs a real Node process, so you build the app and serve it with next start — the framework's own production server. Server components, route handlers, ISR, next/image optimization, middleware and streaming all work as documented, because they are framework features, not platform features.

What you lose is the Vercel-specific layer: their analytics and observability, Edge Config, per-PR preview URLs, and edge-runtime middleware running in dozens of locations rather than in your one Node process. What you gain is a machine that stays up between requests, with a filesystem and a crontab.

Moving an app off Vercel

A realistic afternoon's work for a straightforward app:

1. Check the build locally. npm run build && npm start on the Node version your plan offers. Note the peak memory — this is what decides your plan tier.
2. Create the app. Buy a plan, create a Node.js application in hPanel, set the start command to npm start.
3. Connect the repository. Point the Git integration at your GitHub repo and branch, then copy your environment variables across. This is the step people forget: anything read at build time has to exist before the first build.
4. Move the domain. Point DNS at the new host and let managed SSL issue a certificate. Keep the old deployment live until the new one answers.
5. Recreate scheduled work. Vercel cron entries in vercel.json become cron jobs in hPanel hitting the same routes.
6. Consider keeping Vercel for previews. A Hobby team for personal preview deploys plus production on a flat plan is a legitimate combination, provided the previews themselves are not commercial use.

If the app is wacrm

That is what this site runs, and the Hostinger deployment guide is the step-by-step version: connect your fork, set the Supabase and Meta environment variables, and the CRM is live. The Business plan comfortably runs the app plus a marketing site, and automations use real cron rather than a once-a-day approximation.

For the wider argument about self-hosting a CRM rather than renting one, the free and open-source WhatsApp CRM guide covers the total cost of ownership.

The honest bottom line

If your app is quiet, Vercel Pro at $20/month is not expensive, and the platform is genuinely excellent — nobody should switch hosts over $16. Switch when one of these becomes true: usage has started to appear on the invoice, you are paying for seats rather than traffic, you want work that does not fit a function, or you simply want to stop watching a meter.

If that is where you are, the Business plan is the one to start with, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee if the fit turns out to be wrong.