Vercel Blob Pricing 2026: Free Tier Limits, Storage Costs & When to Upgrade

Vercel Blob is the managed object storage built into the Vercel platform, and its pricing model is easy to misread until your first bill arrives. This post breaks down exactly what you get on the free tier, what triggers an upgrade, and how the per-GB numbers compare once you are paying.

What Vercel Blob actually is

Vercel Blob stores unstructured files — images, PDFs, video clips, generated exports — behind Vercel's edge network. It is not a CDN wrapper around S3 you manage yourself; Vercel handles the bucket, the access tokens, and the edge cache. You upload from a route handler or server action and get back a public URL immediately.

For Next.js projects, the integration is tight. A put() call in a route handler uploads the file; the returned URL is already edge-cached and ready to pass to next/image or serve directly. There is no separate AWS console, no CORS policy to debug, no presigned URL dance for most use cases.

That convenience has a cost, and that cost is where buyers routinely underestimate spend.

Free tier limits in detail

As of September 2026, the Hobby plan includes:

The 500 MB storage cap is cumulative, not monthly. Upload 100 MB of images in January and leave them there — you have 400 MB remaining forever, not reset on February 1. Bandwidth and operations reset monthly.

1,000 write operations sounds like a lot until you build a user-generated content feature, a PDF export pipeline, or anything that creates one blob per user action. A modest SaaS with 50 active users each uploading a few files per week will clear this in days.

Pro plan pricing

Moving to the Pro plan ($20/month per account) raises the included allowances and switches you to pay-as-you-go overages:

The storage rate of $0.023 per GB per month puts Vercel Blob notably above Cloudflare R2 ($0.015/GB, zero egress fees) and above standard S3 us-east-1 ($0.023/GB with egress on top). You are paying for the integration convenience and the edge caching, not raw storage economics.

Bandwidth at $0.08/GB is the line item most teams miss. A site serving 10,000 image downloads per month at an average of 400 KB each burns through 4 GB of egress. That is $0.32 in overages — negligible. Scale to 500,000 downloads and it is $16/month on top of the Pro base. At image-heavy traffic levels — think a marketplace or a media archive — egress becomes the dominant cost fast.

What actually triggers an upgrade from Hobby

Three real scenarios push teams off the free tier:

User file uploads. Any feature where end users submit files — avatars, documents, attachments — hits the 1,000 write limit within weeks on a live product. A form that auto-saves drafts as blobs will do it in days.

Automated exports or reports. If your app generates a PDF or CSV per user action and stores it in Blob, each generation is a write. A workflow automation tool or reporting dashboard can generate thousands of writes per day.

Storage accumulation. 500 MB runs out faster than developers expect when files are not pruned. Profile photos at 200 KB each cap out after 2,500 users. If you are not deleting old blobs, you will hit the ceiling.

Bandwidth alone rarely triggers a Hobby-to-Pro jump because 1 GB of monthly egress is a low bar — even a small portfolio site can exceed it if it serves full-resolution images without resizing.

Vercel Blob vs Cloudflare R2 vs Supabase Storage

Cloudflare R2's zero egress fee changes the economics entirely at scale. If you are serving large files or high download volumes, R2 will cost significantly less even after accounting for setup effort. Supabase Storage makes sense if you are already on Supabase for Postgres — the 100 GB free storage included with the Pro plan is generous for most early-stage products.

Vercel Blob wins on integration speed and operational simplicity. If your team wants to upload a file in a route handler and never think about storage configuration again, the premium over R2 is often worth paying — up to a point.

When the economics flip

Run the numbers at scale: a product storing 50 GB and serving 1 TB of monthly downloads.

• Vercel Blob Pro: storage overage (45 GB × $0.023) = $1.04 + bandwidth overage (900 GB × $0.08) = $72. Total overage: ~$73/month plus $20 base.
• Cloudflare R2: storage (50 GB × $0.015) = $0.75. Egress: $0. Total: ~$1/month plus Cloudflare account.

At that volume, the $90+ monthly delta funds a lot of engineering hours to wire up R2 manually. The crossover point for most teams is somewhere around 200–300 GB of monthly egress — below that, the Vercel Blob convenience is worth the overhead; above it, R2 or a dedicated CDN pays for itself quickly.

Practical recommendations

Stay on Vercel Blob Hobby if you are prototyping or running an internal tool with low file volume. Move to Pro when you hit write limits or need multiple projects. Evaluate R2 or Supabase Storage when your monthly blob egress consistently exceeds 200 GB or your stored file count grows into the tens of thousands without regular pruning.

For Next.js + Sanity projects specifically: Sanity already handles your content images through its own CDN with auto-format and resize. Vercel Blob fills the gap for user-generated uploads, generated exports, and anything Sanity's asset pipeline is not designed for. In that pairing, Blob usage tends to stay low enough that the Pro included allowances cover most teams comfortably.