Vercel Cuts Hobby Deployment Grace Period From 30 Days to Zero

Vercel stopped giving Hobby teams a 30-day grace period before deleting deployments that push them over the plan’s shared 10GB storage limit. Deployments outside a narrow protected set are now removed immediately, according to a Sept. 16 changelog entry from engineers Jay Gengelbach and Pranav Kanchi (Vercel changelog, Sept. 16, 2026).

What changed

Under the new policy, each Hobby project keeps only its 3 most recent production deployments plus its 3 most recent deployments of any type, regardless of age. The current production deployment, aliased deployments and deployments on active branches stay protected too. Everything else is fair game the moment a team crosses the 10GB threshold shared across the account.

Preview deployments took the biggest hit: they no longer get any special retention treatment. Before this change, a preview build that still mattered to a developer could sit around for weeks. Now it’s deleted alongside every other unprotected deployment the instant the account is over quota.

The deletion itself isn’t new. Vercel already purged old deployments once a Hobby team went over 10GB and stayed there for 30 days. What changed is the timer: there’s no more window between crossing the limit and losing the deployment. Enforcement is now immediate.

Vercel’s guidance to affected teams is to either trim usage, by deleting old projects or unused deployments, or upgrade to Pro, which bills additional Deployment Storage at $0.10 per GB per month instead of sharing one hard 10GB pool.

Our take

A hard delete with no grace window is a meaningfully different product than “we’ll clean this up eventually.” Thirty days was enough time for a side-project developer to notice a storage spike, or for the preview build behind a paused client demo to survive an inbox that goes unread over a long weekend. Immediate deletion removes that buffer entirely, and Vercel is framing the change as storage hygiene rather than the monetization lever it also functions as: a free-tier user who wants deployment history to actually persist now has one option, which is to pay.

The preview-deployment change is the sharper edge. Trimming production history is defensible, since most teams only care about the current release. But preview builds are where a lot of Hobby-tier work actually lives: a freelancer’s client review link, a contributor’s pull-request check, a demo shared once and forgotten until someone needs it again. Losing automatic protection for those, with no lead time, is the part most likely to generate support tickets.

Key Takeaways

• Vercel now deletes Hobby deployments over the shared 10GB storage cap immediately, not after the previous 30-day grace period.
• Each project keeps only its 3 most recent production deployments plus its 3 most recent deployments of any type, plus the current production deployment, aliased deployments and active-branch deployments.
• Preview deployments no longer get special retention protection; they’re deleted like any other unprotected deployment once the quota is hit.
• Affected teams can trim usage or upgrade to Pro, which prices additional Deployment Storage at $0.10 per GB per month instead of a shared hard limit.