Vercel Blob Pricing 2026: Free Tier Limits, Storage Costs & When to Upgrade
By Nayan Kyada · · 7 min read
Part of Next.js Performance
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
Per Vercel's Blob pricing docs (October 2026), the Hobby plan includes:
| Resource | Hobby allowance |
|---|---|
| Storage | 1 GB (monthly average) |
| Blob data transfer | 10 GB / month |
Simple operations (URL access on cache MISS, head()) | 10,000 / month |
Advanced operations (put(), copy(), list(), creating a store) | 2,000 / month |
| Blob stores | Unlimited |
Storage is measured as the monthly average size of your store, so files you leave in place keep counting month after month — it's not a fresh allowance you can refill by waiting. Cache HITs don't count as simple operations, and del() is free. If you exceed a Hobby limit you don't get billed; Blob access is blocked until 30 days have passed, unless you upgrade.
2,000 advanced 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. Dashboard browsing and uploads count too. A modest SaaS with 50 active users each uploading a few files per week can clear it within a month.
Pro plan pricing
Moving to the Pro plan ($20/month, which includes $20 of monthly usage credit) removes the hard limits. Blob usage is billed against that credit and then on demand. Rates are regional; these are Vercel's published iad1 (US East) figures:
| Resource | Pro rate (iad1) |
|---|---|
| Storage | $0.023 / GB-month |
| Blob data transfer | $0.05 / GB |
| Simple operations | $0.40 / 1M |
| Advanced operations | $5.00 / 1M |
| Fast Origin Transfer (cache MISS only) | $0.06 / GB |
There is no separate Blob-specific free allowance on Pro beyond the shared monthly credit; check Vercel's pricing page for how Blob transfer interacts with its CDN pricing in your region.
The storage rate of $0.023 per GB per month puts Vercel Blob above Cloudflare R2 ($0.015/GB, zero egress fees) and level with 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.
Data transfer at $0.05/GB (iad1) is the line item most teams miss. A site serving 10,000 image downloads per month at an average of 400 KB each moves 4 GB — about $0.20, negligible. Scale to 500,000 downloads (200 GB) and it is around $10/month, plus origin transfer on cache misses. 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 2,000 advanced-operation 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. 1 GB runs out faster than developers expect when files are not pruned. Profile photos at 200 KB each cap out after about 5,000 users. If you are not deleting old blobs, you will hit the ceiling.
Data transfer can trigger it too: 10 GB a month sounds roomy, but a small portfolio site serving full-resolution images without resizing can exceed it — and on Hobby that means Blob stops serving until the 30-day window resets.
Vercel Blob vs Cloudflare R2 vs Supabase Storage
| Vercel Blob (Pro) | Cloudflare R2 | Supabase Storage (Pro) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage cost | $0.023/GB/mo | $0.015/GB/mo | ~$0.021/GB/mo |
| Egress cost | $0.05/GB (iad1) | $0.00 | $0.09/GB (uncached), $0.03/GB (cached) |
| Included storage | Shared $20 Pro credit | 10 GB/mo free | 100 GB (Pro) |
| Included egress | Shared $20 Pro credit | Unlimited (no egress fees) | 250 GB + 250 GB cached (Pro) |
| Next.js integration | Native | Manual (S3-compatible) | SDK required |
| Edge cache | Yes (automatic) | Custom domain / Workers | Smart CDN (Pro) |
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 (iad1 rates): storage (50 GB × $0.023) = $1.15 + data transfer (1,000 GB × $0.05) = $50, plus origin transfer on cache misses and operations. Roughly $50–60/month in Blob usage, partly offset by the $20 Pro credit.
- Cloudflare R2: storage (40 GB beyond the free 10 GB × $0.015) = $0.60. Egress: $0. Total: under $1/month plus operations.
At that volume, the ~$50 monthly delta funds engineering hours to wire up R2 manually. The crossover depends on your traffic, but somewhere in the hundreds of GB of monthly transfer the R2 setup effort starts paying for itself; below that, the Vercel Blob convenience is usually worth it.
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 approach the Hobby limits (hitting them blocks Blob until the 30-day window resets) or the project is commercial. Evaluate R2 or Supabase Storage when your monthly blob transfer consistently runs into the hundreds of 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 $20 Pro monthly credit covers most teams comfortably.