Vercel Caps Hobby Plan Deployments at 30 Days Starting Today

Vercel is enforcing a new deployment retention cap on its free Hobby plan beginning April 29, 2026. Any deployment older than 30 days will be automatically removed. If you have Hobby plan projects with older deployments still serving traffic — and haven't redeployed recently — those builds start disappearing today.

The change was announced in Vercel's official changelog on April 27. Pro and Enterprise plans are not affected.

What Changes Today

Previously, Vercel Hobby plan users could accumulate unlimited deployments indefinitely — there was no ceiling on how long a build could sit on the platform. Starting today, the maximum retention window is hard-capped at 30 days. A background job marks eligible deployments for deletion within 48 hours of crossing the retention threshold. The deletion is not instantaneous: Vercel provides a 30-day recovery period for successfully built deployments, so you have a window to restore something before it's permanently gone.

The Hobby plan is Vercel's free tier, intended for personal, non-commercial projects. It includes up to 100 GB of fast data transfer, 1 million function invocations per month, and 4 hours of active CPU time. Vercel hosts over 2.3 million websites as of early 2026, with a significant share on the free tier.

What's Protected

Not every deployment is on the chopping block. Vercel has carved out two firm exceptions to the 30-day cap:

Your 10 most recent production deployments — preserved regardless of age
Aliased deployments — any deployment with a custom domain or Vercel alias attached survives the cull

Additionally, the latest preview deployment for any branch with an open or unmerged pull request is also protected. Vercel fixed this edge case earlier this year to prevent active PR previews from being swept up by retention policies.

The 30-day recovery window applies to successfully built deployments that get marked for deletion, giving you time to act if something important is incorrectly caught by the cleanup job.

Who Should Act Now

Developers most at risk are those running older side projects, portfolios, or personal tools on Hobby plan deployments that haven't been redeployed in over a month. If your app's traffic is being served by a build that is more than 30 days old and is neither aliased nor among your 10 most recent production deployments, it will be removed.

Practical steps to take today:

Redeploy any quiet project you want to keep alive — triggering a new deployment resets the retention clock to zero
Add a custom domain or alias to deployments you want permanently exempted from cleanup
Upgrade to Pro ($20/month) if you manage multiple long-lived projects and cannot tolerate automatic deletion

The change also creates implicit pressure on developers who have been quietly running production-adjacent traffic on free Hobby accounts. Vercel explicitly prohibits commercial use on the Hobby plan, and this enforcement tightens the gap between what the free tier promises and what it can realistically sustain long-term.