Netlify Free Plan Credits: Deploy Limits and Paused Sites

Netlify's credit-based Free plan includes 300 monthly credits. A successful production deploy costs 15, so the balance covers 20 deploy charges only if nothing else consumes credits. Bandwidth and requests share that balance. This does not guarantee 20 releases or continued serving after the twentieth charge. Exhaustion pauses every site on the team. Free cannot buy extra credits; the documented options are the next billing cycle or a paid plan. The current pricing and billing FAQ explain those conditions.

Checked: 2026-11-05 JST. Scope: credit-based Free, excluding Legacy and Enterprise. Rates were rechecked after the April 14, 2026 update. The documents have no fixed product version number; retrieval timestamps and saved-body SHA-256 identify the reviewed versions. Live team consumption, exhaustion and recovery remain unverified.

Key points

• Check the team's actual plan type and billing cycle first.
• Budget production deploys, bandwidth and requests together.
• For a paused site, decide whether to wait for renewal or consider a paid plan.
• For static hosting alternatives, compare Cloudflare Pages build and Functions limits separately.

#How many production deploys do 300 credits cover?

With no other usage, 300 / 15 = 20 deploy charges. This is a team-wide budget, not 300 credits per site. The credit documentation lists these current rates.

Compute, AI and other usage can consume the same balance. They are excluded from the static-site calculation below.

#Do previews and failed deploys use deploy credits?

Preview and branch deployment processes, failed deploys and rollbacks to a previous production deploy do not incur deploy charges. Traffic to previews can still use bandwidth and request credits. Count publishing, creating a preview and visiting it separately.

#How does traffic reduce the deploy budget?

Assume an initial balance of 300, no bonus credits, and no compute, AI or other usage. The estimate is C = 15D + 20B + 2R/10,000, where D is successful production deploys, B is GB and R is requests.

These are reproducible local calculations under stated assumptions. They do not reproduce billing rounding or reporting delays. The 15GB figure allocates the entire budget to bandwidth; it is not an independent allowance for a real site. A zero-balance row does not promise continued serving.

#What stops when credits run out?

The official FAQ describes all web projects on the team being paused, including existing sites: serving and new production deploys stop. The documented visitor message is Site not available. That message alone does not establish exhaustion; check the team's usage and pause reason. The actual exhaustion screen was not observed here.

#Can I buy more credits on Free?

No. Credit packs and auto recharge are options for Personal and Pro. On Free, the documented choices after exhaustion are waiting for the next billing cycle or upgrading. Purchases and plan changes were not tested for this article.

#When can the sites resume, and what should I check?

Monthly credits reset at the start of the billing cycle. The cycle depends on when the team account starts, so do not assume the first of the calendar month. Check the team, actual plan, balance, cycle start date and usage by meter. Cycle rollover and recovery were not measured.

#What changed from the old 100GB free tier?

Both specified pricing captures were retrieved and their bodies read on November 5, 2026. A capture date is not a policy start date. The credit-plan announcement is dated September 5, 2025; current docs specify September 4, 2025 for new accounts.

Sources: August capture, September capture, April 14 official update, and current pricing/docs. Build minutes measure build time; GB-hours measure runtime compute. They are not interchangeable.

#Does the old 30GB calculation still apply?

Allocating all 300 credits to bandwidth gives 30GB at the old rate of 10/GB and 15GB at today's 20/GB. Both exclude other usage. Neither is a universal real-world usage cap. Do not treat a 2025 explanation as the current free allowance.

#Do these limits apply to Legacy accounts?

Current docs classify Free, Starter and Pro accounts created before September 4, 2025 as Legacy and describe switching to credit-based plans as optional. The April update excludes Legacy. Account age alone does not establish its current plan; check the actual plan type.

#When should I consider Cloudflare Pages?

Pages Functions pricing makes static asset requests free and unlimited when they do not invoke Functions. Functions use Workers quotas. Pages limits specify 500 builds/month on Free, one concurrent build, a 20-minute build timeout, 20,000 files and 25 MiB per file. Netlify's billable production deploys and Pages' build allowance measure different things; a multiplier comparison would be misleading.

Migration, speed, reliability and real cost comparisons were not measured. Use SaaS Workflows and the SaaS integration topic to continue evaluating a setup. The Japanese version keeps the same conditions.

#What was measured, and what remains unverified?

Seven official documents and two pricing captures were reread. The local calculator checked 220 combinations including the three examples, rejected 20 invalid inputs and detected three deliberately wrong variants: zero deploy cost, old bandwidth rate 10, and zero request cost. This is not a measurement of Netlify's billing implementation. Live team consumption, pausing, recovery and paid-plan changes remain unverified.

What to check next

Confirm the plan and billing cycle, then estimate the balance from recent production deploys, bandwidth and requests. If paused, decide whether to wait or consider a paid plan. For a static migration, check Pages limits and required features. An AI handoff should keep the check date, plan, balance, cycle, meter usage, source URLs and unresolved items, without tokens or account identifiers.