Predictable, Hard-Capped Static Hosting For Indie Builders Stranded By Netlify's Credit-Based Billing And Vercel's Surprise-Bill History

saas real project •• multiple requests

Netlify switched to credit-based billing in September 2025 and updated the rates again in April 2026, with users reporting 277 of 300 credits burned by 16 deploys and one AI call in a single day. Reddit and Netlify Forums are full of refugees, but Cloudflare Pages requires you to commit to Cloudflare's full edge stack and Vercel has its own surprise-bill history. The gap is a small-scale, flat-rate static + functions host that hard-caps deploys per month and refuses to overage you, aimed at indie builders rather than VC-funded apps.

builder note

Pricing is the entire product here. $5/mo, 50 GB bandwidth, 1000 builds, your site goes read-only if you hit the cap, no overage option. Indie builders will love the honesty. Build on top of Bunny CDN or DigitalOcean Spaces... don't try to be Cloudflare. The differentiator is 'we will literally let your site stop working before we charge you a dollar you didn't agree to.'

landscape (3 existing solutions)

The static-hosting market split into 'free but no functions' (GitHub Pages) and 'all-you-can-eat with usage-based surprise pricing' (Netlify, Vercel) with Cloudflare Pages threading the needle by locking you into Cloudflare. There is room for a small, no-frills, flat-rate hosting service with Netlify-style git-deploys and functions but explicit refusal to overage.

Cloudflare Pages Unlimited bandwidth on free tier, but binds you to Cloudflare Workers for any dynamic functionality and the Workers free tier has its own hard CPU-time and request count limits that are easy to hit invisibly.

Vercel hard spend limits (late 2025) Vercel added hard spend caps, but the platform still bills serverless function executions in a way users find unpredictable, and a recent security incident plus credit-style billing left small teams unsure if 'hard cap' really means hard.

GitHub Pages Free and unbillable, but no functions, no preview deploys per PR by default, no built-in form handling, no built-in redirects beyond Jekyll's tooling.

sources (3)

other https://answers.netlify.com/t/credit-based-billing-is-terrib... "16 deploys, one AI request, I have ALREADY used 277.6/300 credits" 2025-12-10

other https://www.netlify.com/changelog/2026-04-14-pricing-updates... "Pricing updates for Credit-based plans" 2026-04-14

other https://kuberns.com/blogs/netlify-pricing/ "Predatory pricing model... migrations to Cloudflare Pages" 2026-03-01

hostingindie-hackersjamstackbillingnetlify-refugee