Vercel Password Protection Now Costs $20 a Project, Not $150

Vercel broke Password Protection out of its all-or-nothing add-on: Pro teams can now turn it on for a single project at $20 a month instead of paying $150 a month to cover every project on the team (Vercel changelog, September 9, 2026).

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What changed

Password Protection puts a password prompt in front of a deployment before anyone can view it, standard for staging environments and client previews that shouldn’t be public. Until this change, the only way to get it on Pro was the Advanced Deployment Protection add-on: $150 a month, applied at the team level, covering every project whether you wanted all of them protected or just one (Vercel changelog, September 9, 2026).

That bundle is gone for new purchases. Pro teams now enable Password Protection per project from Security > Deployment Protection in a project’s settings, and get billed $20 a month for each project that has it turned on. A team protecting one project pays $20 instead of $150; a team protecting eight pays $160, more than the old flat rate (Vercel docs, Usage & Pricing for Deployment Protection).

Existing Advanced Deployment Protection customers aren’t moved automatically. Vercel is keeping their current billing and coverage in place, now labeled Team-level Password Protection on invoices, and teams have to contact support if they’d rather switch to the per-project model (Vercel docs, Usage & Pricing for Deployment Protection). Passport and Trusted IPs, the other two identity-based protection methods, remain Enterprise-only and untouched by this change.

Our take

Unbundling is usually framed as a customer win, and here it is for the common case: most Pro teams protecting deployments are protecting a handful of staging or preview projects, not their whole portfolio, and $20 for exactly the ones that need it beats $150 for all of them whether they need it or not. Daily.dev’s changelog roundup flagged this one as a pricing shift that can turn into a surprise line item if a team isn’t watching it, a fair read since a la carte pricing cuts both ways (daily.dev, September 2026).

The math flips once a team crosses roughly seven or eight protected projects, where per-project billing costs more than the old flat rate ever did. Vercel’s answer for those teams is to leave the $150 add-on in place rather than force a migration, which is the right call, but it also means two customers with identical protection needs can now be on different pricing models depending only on when they signed up. That’s a reasonable trade for a platform simplifying its default path, less so if you’re the team trying to explain the difference to finance.

Key Takeaways

• Password Protection on Pro now costs $20 per month per protected project, enabled individually in a project’s Deployment Protection settings.
• The old model was a $150-a-month, team-level add-on that covered every project regardless of how many actually needed protection.
• Existing Advanced Deployment Protection customers keep their current $150 flat-rate billing, relabeled Team-level Password Protection, unless they ask support to switch.
• Teams protecting roughly eight or more projects still come out ahead on the old flat-rate model; smaller teams save money under per-project pricing.