Vercel alternative: Faable Deploy vs Vercel

Short answer: Vercel is the best-known home for Next.js: push to Git, get a deploy on a global CDN, with serverless functions for the dynamic parts. Faable Deploy keeps the same push-to-deploy workflow and differs where teams usually start looking elsewhere. Its free plan allows commercial use, while Vercel’s Hobby is for personal projects only. Your code runs as a real, long-running server, not a function with a time limit. You pay a fixed monthly fee per project, not per seat plus usage. And Faable Auth is included, with apps and data hosted in Europe by a European company.

Vercel details checked against vercel.com pricing, plan docs and limits in November 2026. They change often, so confirm anything decisive on their own site.

At a glance

	Faable Deploy	Vercel
Deploy from Git, zero config	✅ Node.js, Python, PHP; Dockerfile on Hobby and Pro	✅ Next.js first, plus other frameworks
Free plan	✅ permanent, no card	✅ Hobby
Commercial use on the free plan	✅	❌ “non-commercial personal use only”
Custom domains on the free plan	✅	✅
How your backend runs	A long-running server process in a container	Serverless functions
Request time limit	60 s to the first byte, then streams for as long as it needs	300 s on Hobby; up to 800 s on Pro
Background workers and cron	✅ workers, scheduled tasks (Hobby and Pro)	Cron jobs; background workers in beta
First paid tier	15 €/month per project, fixed	$20/month per deploying seat, with $20 of usage credit, then usage billed on top
Team members	Not billed per seat	$20/month per extra Owner or Member
Data transfer	10 GB (Free) and 50 GB (Hobby) included, never billed per GB; Pro meters beyond 100 GB at 0.18 €/GB	100 GB on Hobby, then you wait for the next 30-day window; 1 TB on Pro, then from $0.15/GB
Edge firewall	✅ managed rulesets + your own rules, every plan	✅ DDoS and bot protection on every plan; custom rules: 3 on Hobby, 40 on Pro
Bundled identity (OAuth 2.0, OIDC)	✅ Faable Auth, 15,000 MAU free	❌ a second vendor
Per-branch preview deployments	❌	✅
Global edge network	❌ served from Europe	✅
Where your app runs	In the EU, operated by a European company	`iad1` (Washington, D.C.) by default, other regions selectable; US company
Currency	EUR	USD

Why teams look for a Vercel alternative

The free plan has to stay personal

Vercel’s terms are explicit: “Hobby teams are for non-commercial personal use only”, and “all commercial usage requires a Pro or Enterprise plan”. Commercial use includes taking payments, showing ads, and paid or affiliate work. So a client’s landing page, an indie product with a Stripe checkout, or a blog with AdSense has to move to Pro, however little traffic it gets.

Faable’s Free plan allows commercial use. It is permanent, needs no credit card, includes custom domains, and runs each app with up to 0.6 vCPU and 512 MB. An idle app sleeps after 30 minutes and wakes in a few seconds. Static sites are served directly, with no container, so they never have a cold start.

Your backend is a server, not a function

On Vercel, the dynamic parts of your app run as functions: up to 300 seconds on Hobby and 800 seconds on Pro, with 2 GB of memory by default. That suits request–response pages. It gets awkward for the things a product backend does all day, like consuming a queue, holding a connection open, or running a job that takes a while.

On Faable your code runs as an ordinary server process in a Linux container: Next.js with next start, Express, Fastify, NestJS, Django, FastAPI, Flask, Laravel or plain PHP, all detected and built without configuration. There’s no per-invocation limit to design around. The only timeout is 60 seconds to the first byte, and a response can then stream for minutes, which is what LLM apps need (see Hosting AI agents in Europe). On Hobby and Pro, a process with no web server at all can run as a background worker, and commands can run on a cron schedule as scheduled tasks, even while the app sleeps.

A bill you can predict

Vercel Pro is $20 a month for one deploying seat, with $20 of usage credit. Every extra Owner or Member is another $20. Usage beyond the credit (data transfer, CDN requests, function invocations, CPU time and build minutes) is billed on demand, uncapped unless you configure a spend limit. New teams start with a $200 on-demand budget.

Faable charges a fixed fee per plan, per project: Hobby is 15 €/month and Pro 99 €/month, with no per-seat charge. On Free and Hobby there is no per-GB line at all: the traffic allowance is what the plan includes, and going over it sends warnings at 80 %, 90 % and 100 % instead of opening a meter. Only Pro meters egress, beyond its 100 GB. See Deploy pricing.

Auth is in the same subscription

Most apps on Vercel add a second vendor for sign-in, such as Clerk, Auth0 or Cognito, with its own bill and its own data-processing agreement. On Faable, Faable Auth is part of the plan: hosted login, social and passwordless sign-in, MFA, passkeys and machine-to-machine tokens, with 15,000 monthly active users on Free and no MAU limit on Hobby and Pro.

European by construction

Vercel runs functions in Washington, D.C. (iad1) unless you pick another region. Even with a European region, the company operating your app, and the law that can reach it, stays American. Faable is a European company: your apps and data are hosted in the EU, and hosting and identity sit under one European provider and one data-processing agreement. More in European alternatives to Vercel, Render and Railway.

A firewall that closes the obvious doors for you

Both platforms filter traffic at the edge on every plan. Vercel gives you DDoS mitigation and bot protection, plus 3 custom rules on Hobby and 40 on Pro. Faable’s Web Application Firewall adds rulesets we maintain: requests for .env files, Git metadata, credentials, admin panels and PHP probes are blocked before they reach your code or wake a sleeping app. You can add your own rules by path, user-agent or query parameter. It doesn’t inspect request bodies, so it isn’t a replacement for an OWASP signature engine.

When Vercel might fit better

Your app is Next.js, and you want edge rendering and middleware on a global CDN. Faable serves from Europe; for a mostly European audience that is closer anyway, but it isn’t a worldwide edge network.
Your workflow depends on a preview deployment for every pull request. Faable doesn’t create per-branch previews; you can deploy a staging app from your own CI.
You rely on Vercel-specific products such as Edge Config, v0 or their analytics and observability suite.

Moving from Vercel

Most projects move without code changes. Connect the same repository, copy your environment variables, deploy, and point your domain at Faable. Next.js builds with standalone output automatically, so the deployed artifact stays around 150 MB. The step-by-step version, including what changes when serverless functions become a long-running process, is in Migrate from Vercel.

Get started with Faable Deploy: free, no credit card.

Other Vercel alternatives

If you’re comparing more than two options, these pages put each one side by side with Faable Deploy:

Railway and Render: container platforms billed in USD, by usage or per instance.
Netlify: the other frontend-first platform, now billed in credits.
Heroku: the original git-push platform, billed per dyno.
Fly.io: VMs close to your users, configured by you.
Coolify: open-source and self-hosted on your own server.
Need your app hosted in Europe? European alternatives to Vercel, Render and Railway compares the providers that are European companies, not only an EU region.

Last updated on November 13, 2026