Shipcel vs Vercel

A small commercial site costs $0 a month on Shipcel + Cloudflare and $20 on Vercel; a busy app about $5.60 against about $40. A free Vercel site pauses for 30 days once it passes 100 GB of transfer in a month; Cloudflare serves files without limit, and its daily limits reset every night.

The short answer

What you pay a month
	Shipcel + Cloudflare	Vercel
A personal site: 20,000 page views a month, no server code	$0. Static files are free and unlimited, with no transfer charge.	$0 on Hobby, for personal projects only: 40 GB of transfer, inside the 100 GB included.
A small business site: 50,000 page views and 150,000 API calls a month	$0. Files are free; 150,000 Worker requests are 5,000 a day, inside the free 100,000.	$20. Hobby doesn’t allow commercial use, so Pro: $20 for one developer, with 100 GB of transfer and 500,000 requests inside the included 1 TB and 1 million, and the API calls inside the $20 credit.
A busy app: 1 million page views, 8 million requests for pages and files, 2 TB of transfer, 3 million API calls	$5.60. Workers Paid $5 (10 million requests and 30 million CPU-milliseconds included) plus 30 million more CPU-milliseconds at $0.02 a million; no charge for transfer.	About $40. $20 for one developer, plus the $20 Flat Rate CDN tier (10 million requests, 50 TB) once the included 1 million requests and 1 TB are passed; about $6 of function usage is covered by the $20 credit.
Add a 2 GB SQL database to any of these	+$0 to $5. Workers Paid, if you don’t pay it already: D1 is included, with 5 GB and 25 billion rows read a month.	+$25. Vercel has no database of its own: a Marketplace one, for example Supabase Pro at $25, billed by that company.

How far the free plan goes
	Shipcel + Cloudflare free plans	Vercel Hobby
Page views a month, at 2 MB a page	No limit: static files are free and unlimited	About 50,000: 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer
Server and API requests	100,000 a day, about 3 million a month	1 million a month, and 4 hours of CPU
Commercial use	Allowed by Shipcel; Cloudflare positions its free plans for personal projects	Not allowed: personal, non-commercial use only
When you go over	Server requests fail until midnight UTC; files keep serving; nothing is billed	The project is paused, usually for 30 days; extra usage can’t be bought

Assumptions: 2 MB a page view (the page, scripts, styles and images), about 10 requests a view, 20 ms of CPU per API call, Vercel in its US regions, US dollars before tax. Vercel’s Hobby, Pro, Flat Rate CDN and Fluid compute pages and Cloudflare’s Workers pricing page were read on 28 October 2026.

Which one fits

Vercel builds and serves web apps on its own platform and is the reference host for Next.js. Shipcel uses Cloudflare’s build system and network inside your own account, adds databases and file storage from the same account, and charges nothing itself. The main differences are commercial use on the free plan, per-seat pricing, and where your database lives.

Choose Shipcel if

You run a commercial app and want to start free: Vercel’s Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use, so a paying product needs Pro at $20 per deploying seat.
You want your database and files in the same account and bill: Vercel’s databases are Marketplace services from other companies, billed separately and outside Vercel’s spend management.
You want a free plan that keeps serving: a Hobby project that exceeds its included usage is paused, usually for 30 days, while Cloudflare’s daily limits reset every night.
You want to own the infrastructure: your apps, databases and files stay in your Cloudflare account if you stop using Shipcel.

Choose Vercel if

You build with Next.js and want every feature supported natively. Shipcel runs Next.js through the OpenNext adapter, with ISR through its cache in R2.
You want mature built-in tooling: observability, analytics, firewall rules and enterprise features such as single sign-on.
You want previews for Next.js apps or for pull requests from forks. Shipcel’s previews (Cloudflare Worker Previews, in beta) cover branches and pull requests in your own repository, not Next.js yet.
You want login-protected previews without setting up another product: Vercel Authentication is free on every plan. Shipcel uses Cloudflare Access, which you set up once in Cloudflare’s Zero Trust dashboard: free for 50 people, but Cloudflare asks for a payment method.
You need a proven service today. Shipcel is in alpha.

Side by side

Free plans
	Shipcel + Cloudflare free plans	Vercel Hobby
Price	$0	$0
Commercial use	Shipcel allows it. Cloudflare has no general ban but positions its free plans for personal and hobby projects, and its terms forbid collecting card details on sites using Free services	Not allowed: personal, non-commercial use only
Requests	100,000 Worker requests a day; static files unlimited	1 million CDN requests and 1 million function invocations a month
Compute	10 ms of CPU per request	4 CPU-hours and 360 GB-hours of memory a month
Transfer	No per-gigabyte charge; static files free and unlimited	100 GB of Fast Data Transfer a month
SQL database	D1 included: 5 GB, 5 million rows read a day	Not included: Marketplace providers with their own plans
File storage	R2: 10 GB free (R2 is added through a checkout that needs a payment method)	Blob: 1 GB
When you exceed it	Requests fail until midnight UTC; nothing is billed	The project is paused, usually for 30 days; extra usage can’t be bought
Organization repositories	Supported	Can’t connect repositories owned by a GitHub organization

Paid plans
	Shipcel + Cloudflare Workers Paid	Vercel Pro
Price	$5 a month per Cloudflare account; Shipcel $0	$20 a month per deploying seat, including $20 of usage credit
Transfer	No per-gigabyte charge for Workers responses; static files and R2 egress free	Flat Rate CDN: 1 TB and 1 million CDN requests included; 50 TB tiers from $20 a month, excluding bulk downloads and media-heavy sites. On demand: $0.15 to $0.35 per GB
Requests	10 million a month included, then $0.30 per million	Function invocations $0.60 per million; CDN requests $2.00 to $3.20 per million on demand
Compute	30 million CPU-ms a month included, then $0.02 per million CPU-ms	Active CPU $0.128 to $0.221 an hour; memory $0.0106 to $0.0183 per GB-hour
SQL database	D1 included: 25 billion rows read, 50 million written and 5 GB a month	A separate Marketplace bill (for example Neon or Supabase)
Spending control	No hard cap from Cloudflare. Shipcel’s budget guard alerts over a budget ($0 by default) and can pause the app; Cloudflare’s budget alerts email you	Spend management on by default with a $200 alert; pausing production is optional and can lag by minutes

Features
	Shipcel	Vercel
Deploy from GitHub	Yes, with GitHub Actions in your repository	Yes
Preview URLs	Every branch and pull request in your repository, with the address commented on the pull request (Cloudflare Worker Previews, beta); not yet for Next.js or containers	Every push and pull request
Deploy without Git	Drag and drop, the shipcel CLI, or your own AI agent through MCP	The vercel CLI
AI building	Your own AI agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others) through Shipcel’s MCP server; Shipcel runs no model and charges nothing for it	v0: 7 messages a day on Free
Rollback	One click to any earlier version, or a share of traffic on a new version first	Instant Rollback; Hobby can only roll back to the previous deployment
Teams	Shared workspaces with owner, developer and viewer roles, free	Hobby is for one person; Pro charges $20 per deploying seat, and Viewer seats are free
Environment variables	Runtime secrets, and build variables for production and for branch previews	Production, Preview and Development values, with per-branch Preview values
Protected previews	Sign-in through Cloudflare Access, in your account; Zero Trust’s free plan covers 50 people, and Cloudflare asks for a payment method to set it up	Vercel Authentication, free on every plan since September 2026
Cron jobs	Cloudflare Cron Triggers, set in your Wrangler configuration or in Manage → Schedules; 5 per account on the free plan	100 per project; on Hobby each runs at most once a day
Next.js	Through OpenNext, with ISR through its cache in R2	Native, including ISR, image optimization and middleware
Python	Python Workers (Pyodide-compatible packages)	Python 3.12 to 3.14 functions
Containers	Cloudflare Containers on Workers Paid	Container images in beta, run as functions
SQL database	D1 (SQLite) in your account	Marketplace partners
Sign-in for your users	Built in: passkeys, GitHub, Google and email, as standard OpenID Connect	Third-party Marketplace providers such as Clerk and Auth0
Realtime	Channels with presence and broadcast on Durable Objects	WebSocket connections served by Vercel Functions
Logs and analytics	Request analytics and Workers Logs in Manage; the free plan keeps 200,000 log events a day for 3 days	Built in
Where it runs	Your Cloudflare account	Vercel’s platform

What it costs

A small commercial app

One developer runs a paid product: a web frontend and API, a 2 GB database and 20 GB of user files, with about 300,000 page views a month.

Monthly cost
Setup	Per month	How it adds up
Vercel Pro + Supabase Pro	$45	Vercel Pro: $20 for one developer, with $20 of usage, enough here; Hobby can’t be used commercially. Supabase Pro: $25, including one Micro database (8 GB disk, 100 GB of files).
Shipcel + Cloudflare	$5.15	Shipcel: $0. Workers Paid: $5, needed because the 2 GB database is over D1’s 500 MB free limit per database; it includes 10 million requests and 5 GB of D1 storage. R2: 10 GB free, then 10 GB × $0.015 = $0.15.

Assumptions: About 300,000 page views a month is roughly 10,000 a day, well inside the included requests. Usage stays inside Vercel Pro’s $20 credit and Supabase Pro’s quotas. US dollars before tax.

About $5 a month instead of $45, roughly a ninth, mostly because there is no per-seat fee and the database comes with the same account.

Billing and surprise-bill protection

Vercel Hobby is never billed: projects pause when they exceed the included usage.
Vercel Pro turns on spend management by default with a $200 on-demand budget that sends alerts. Pausing production at the budget is a separate, optional switch that can lag by several minutes; without it, on-demand usage is uncapped. Seats, add-ons and Marketplace databases aren’t counted.
Cloudflare’s free plan is never billed for Workers, D1 or KV: over a daily limit, requests and queries fail until midnight UTC. R2 file storage bills usage beyond its free tier (never egress).
Workers Paid ($5 a month per account) has no hard spending cap. Budget alerts email you when usage passes an amount ($10 by default) but don’t stop anything; per-Worker CPU and subrequest limits can stop runaway code. Shipcel’s budget guard alerts over each app’s budget ($0 by default) and can pause the app, minutes after the budget is crossed.

Moving from Vercel

Commit a Wrangler configuration and import the repository; Shipcel checks it and lists anything missing.
Next.js apps need the OpenNext adapter, added once with npx wrangler setup. ISR needs OpenNext’s cache: the Next.js starter kit sets it up in R2, and Shipcel fills it at each production deploy.
Environment variables become Worker secrets in Manage → Runtime secrets.
Move your domain’s DNS to Cloudflare, then attach it in Manage → Domains.

Sources

Checked 8 October 2026. Prices change; confirm on each provider's page before you decide.