Next.js hosting cost in 2026: Vercel vs Netlify vs Railway vs VPS
Next.js hosting cost is one of those things that looks simple until your first invoice arrives. This post puts a realistic monthly number on five categories of host for the same mid-traffic site: ~80 k page views/month, ~4 GB egress, ISR on ~200 routes, and next/image serving ~300 k image transforms/month. No free-tier demos — actual production numbers as of August 2026. The reference site I'm…
In August 2026, a report compared the hosting costs for five different hosting platforms to run a typical Next.js app with mid-traffic. The reference site handled 80,000 page views per month, 4 GB of outbound egress, 200 routes with ISR, and 300,000 image transformations monthly.
Vercel's Pro plan starts at $60 for a two-person team, but image optimisation can quickly add up to $1,500 with Vercel's 5,000 source image free tier. ISR function invocations are included up to 1 million per month. Netlify's Core tier costs $19 per seat, but its image CDN is in beta, and overages for function invocations are steep at $25 per million.
Railway and Render offer containerized hosts where you manage the Next.js runtime, implementing ISR and image optimisation yourself. Fly.io provides pay-as-you-go pricing at $5–10 for modest traffic, with $0.02 per GB egress. Finally, a bare VPS like Hetzner offers the cheapest option at $24 for a 4 vCPU/8 GB instance, but the hidden cost is the time needed to manage and maintain the server.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
