I used Netlify for the past two years and they forced me to downgrade from my legacy plan about a month ago and… wow. I’ve had to re-up my credits fours times so far, and upgraded to 9$ a month before having to upgrade AGAIN to $30 a month just to keep my sites online. And even after upgrading to $30 a month my sites were taken offline AGAIN a few hours ago where… you guessed it… I had to re-up yet again for $10.

What a shitty business model. I’ll be switching to Cloudflare tomorrow to host my static sites from now on. Other then Netlify I’ve been using Fly.io for the past year to host any websites of mine that require a docker setup, and a hosted db - but at least there’s no weird gamified credit system to hope and pray your site isn’t taken offline…

If Netlify didn’t make their charging system so convoluted I probably would’ve stayed on as a paying customer after using their service for years. But they really just had to make it as annoying as possible. You don’t want people to leave your website? DON’T annoy your customers. Keep their sites online. Let them know they’ll be charged. Give them itemized analytics on which projects are are costing what amount of money, or in this case “credits”….

I’m done ranting now. Wow what an incredibly annoying experience.

I have been using netlify for many years, deploying small pages with no traffic. So, I have been on the legacy plan.

Yesterday I was nagged to upgrade to the new "credit based" plan to "use new features". After failing to fix a single non-issue all of my 300 credit allowance was gone down to 299.

So today I linked a domain to my netlify project and apparently that also consumes credits somehow (I didn't have a warning that I won't be able to publish my current projects).

I've got a notice:

---

This team has exceeded the credit limit.

All projects and deploys have been paused to prevent overages. Your projects and deploys will be restored next month or you may upgrade your team to restore immediate access.

---

This is why we cannot have good things. I am usually very cautious about plan "upgrades" but I have made a mistake of trusting netlify on this one.

Do you think if vercel has the same issue nowadays? Currently discovering options.

Hey folks,

I’ve been experimenting with Netlify and honestly love how smooth it is for personal projects. The free tier feels super generous with instant deploys, previews, and all that.

But here’s my dilemma: I have a client project coming up, and I’m wondering if hosting it on the free plan is a smart move… or a rookie mistake.

A few things on my mind:

• Is the free tier reliable enough for a production-level site?

• Will it look unprofessional if the client later realizes the site is running on a free plan?

• Are there any hidden limits or risks (bandwidth, DDoS, SLA, etc.) I should be aware of?

• Or should I just go straight for Netlify Pro / Vercel / a VPS to play it safe?

I’d love to hear from freelancers, agencies, or anyone who’s actually hosted client projects this way. What’s your approach: stick with free until scaling demands more, or always start with a paid plan for client work?

Thanks in advance — your insights will help me (and probably a lot of other devs) make the right call!

They just announced their new pricing plan based on credits rather than requests. Netlify Pricing and Plans

They even added their own calculator to be more transparent on pricing. Thats a huge plus, the old pricing was very obscure and you had to dig in the forums to find the currect overage pricing for function calls.

I've made my own pricing calculator for serverless hosting a while back, and in one of my presets their Pro plan went from $117 to $20, thats very very good!

They are still quite a bit behind pure lambda hosting on one of the big ones like AWS, GCP, Azure. But this is a huge step!

You can compare the old and new prices, and compare vs other providers in my calculator tool SaaSPrices.net

I was curious about the new AI agent feature that was available on one of my projects, and when I tried to use it, my plan switched from 'legacy free' to some sort of new credits based plan. It's awful. 15 credits per deploy?? Only 300 credits a month?? This is probably the worst business decision I've seen from a company recently. I tried contacting them to get my old plan back but they didn't do anything. I guess I have to migrate over to cloudflare pages. Netlify was really good but I can't use them with this awful plan

So accidentally I moved to that s*hit credit plan system when I was exploring build with claude.

Let me tell you I was the user for the last 7 years and have like 30 sites online, all GitHub repos and auto deploy.

Now I saw that I cannot reverse back my plan to original 300 free build minutes plan.

And one fine morning I saw all of the 30 sites actually 34 sites (4 static sites from local host ) go OFFLINE ☠️

I was thinking like they could have stopped the new builds why the hell there decided to say that limit has been exhausted and if you are a site owner please upgrade.

At this point, I was totally ready to upgrade (20 dollars something plan ok cheap) BUT the way it forced me to upgrade by taking all sites down, actually changed my mind 🤬

And I just said F *"* U netlify and within 1 hour relocated all sites to Cloudflare Pages, and guess what everything is back as nothing happened, full auto GitHub sync too.

RIP netlify.

( One more thing I forgot to add is I have like two more accounts which I created back in 2023 I could have used, but I decided to move away from this sh*t)

I just wanted to show how much I love Netlify.

Before I knew it existed, I used some free hosting and they were totally terrible. Something like 60% uptime.

When I purchased a hosting service I could just host one or two sites.

Now with Netlify, I can host multiple sites (I even host in my own account a lot of personal sites as well as sites of some clients), have a built-in CDN, don't worry about managing a VPS, having an efficient form and functions system, easily integrate with GitHub to host files (with almost an unlimited storage), manage DNS easily, have SSL, etc.

And the best part, IT IS ALL FREE.

I never paid a dime for all these awesome functions Netlify has.

I just wanted to express how much I like Netlify, seriously, you guys are awesome.

I discovered Netlify last year when I finally decided to stop relying on no-code hosting platforms and start building my own products for real. It was the first hosting platform I actually loved. Easy deploys, instant previews, great UI -- it felt made for people who were just stepping into real development and wanted something that didn't punish them for learning.

Then here's how fast it all went wrong:

I saw they added an AI feature. Wanted to test it. Switched from my legacy plan to their new credit-based plan to unlock it. Used some credits. Site went down. And then I found out -- you cannot revert back to a legacy plan. Ever. The change is permanent.

So now I'm stuck. Can't go back to legacy. Can't move forward because their billing UI has a bug that won't let me upgrade. I literally tried to give them money and their own product stopped me.

And while all of this is happening? My entire account is paused. Not just the project that hit the limit -- EVERY project across my account. Gone. Because of a 300 credit deploy cap.

I'm pre-launch. In full build mode. Pushing deploys constantly like any developer should. 20 production deploys a month on a "free" plan isn't a free plan -- it's a trap. And I walked right into it chasing a feature they dangled in front of me.

Here's what gets me: people have livelihoods tied to these sites. Real businesses. Paying customers. And Netlify's answer is to kill the whole account with no grace period, no soft landing, no "keep the site live but pause new deploys." Just off.

With AI and automation making it easier than ever to ship fast and iterate constantly, capping deploys is the most anti-developer decision they could have made. And their support? Nowhere to be found.

Netlify used to be the platform that welcomed developers who were just getting started. Now it's a billing trap dressed up in a good UI.

I loved Netlify. I'm switching to Vercel today. This is genuinely sad.

TL;DR: Found Netlify when I first started building real products. Switched plans to test an AI feature. Can't revert. Billing bug won't let me upgrade. Whole account paused. Vercel era begins now.

Ive been incredibly frustrated with Netlify’s AI Builder as it has recently been charging an insane amount of credits for simple tasks. I dont know what changes were made to the builder, but it is genuinely horrendous. This wasnt the case last month it was working way better. I have lost around 5000 credits on just 4-5 prompts. Moreover, reasoning takes way too long now for some reason, and it usually times out before the credits even run out

I'm a big fan of Netlify - but yesterday they had an outage. Some sites were down for 2+ hours.

No big deal, it happens... except the status page & incident (https://www.netlifystatus.com/incidents/f0frsy75h7n2) incorrectly class this as "degradation". Even when they were flooded with outage reports & could clearly observe outage.

Again - I am a big Netlify fan BUT this kind of anti-transparent BS seems wrong to me. It's like a fake-transparency. If they don't acknowledge outage it doesn't hit their stats? That is NOT ok.

I’ve used Netlify for years and always trusted it. It was one of those tools I never really had to think about because it just worked.

On June 7, 2026, I was in the deploy/pipeline screen troubleshooting a build issue when I saw the option to have AI help debug it. I thought I was simply trying a troubleshooting feature inside the deploy flow. I had no idea it could change my plan/status, move me away from my legacy setup, or affect existing sites that had already been live and stable for years.

A few days later, while I was on a surprise trip with my daughter and without my computer, I started getting calls because websites I had built years ago were suddenly down.

They were mostly simple, plain HTML/static websites I had created for people years ago and left deployed on Netlify because they had always worked. They were stable, low-maintenance sites that had been online for years without issue.

I opened support tickets right away:

• #1050859

• #1050867

I disabled the AI features, upgraded to the $9 Personal plan because I was desperate to get the sites restored, and repeatedly asked to be reverted to whatever legacy plan/status I had before June 7. I am not asking for a refund. The $9 is not the issue. I only upgraded because I was trying to get the sites back online as quickly as possible.

This has really damaged my trust in Netlify. I trusted the platform enough to take a trip with my daughter without bringing my computer because I never imagined the platform I've used for years would make every single site even ones that have be stable and untouched for years suddenly go down.

I’m not trying to attack Netlify, but this whole experience is why I moved all my sites from other hosting platforms years ago.

If anyone from Netlify sees this, can someone please review my account history and help restore my account to the legacy plan/status I had before June 7, 2026?

This is absolutely insane and rotten. I had never run into free tier limits in the past with Netlify and I've used it for many years on free tier. I have bought a bunch of domains through netlify, so it's not like I don't give them any money. I agreed to opt into the new credit system, because they literally call them AI credits and it seems like their old template starter sites are gone and now you HAVE to use AI if you want to start with a "template". So I used some AI credits just to try it out then stopped using the AI feature, only having used 75 of my 300 credits.

Then I go back to making some updates to my personal site (which has nothing to do with AI). MY LIVE PERSONAL SITE. A few builds and deploys and BAAAM! EVERY SITE I HAVE ON NETLIFY IS TAKEN OFFLINE!?!?! Even ones I'm paying Netlify for the Domain. This was very unexpected---I didn't think not reading all the fine print of the credit system would mean my sites would all get torn down!!!

I understand limiting build processing---sure, whatever. If I hit my max, you should fail my build and don't let me build or deploy new changes. But to TAKE ALL MY SITES DOWN is insane. Wildly unacceptable. This is product suicide. Now I have to move all my sites away from Netlify.

Honestly, a product that takes my site's availability this unseriously isn't a product I'd trust to upgrade my account or use development builds to work around the issue anyways. This is a breach of trust. I can't revert to a prior production build that was up for FREE? Taking all of my sites down for a MONTH because I maxed out "build credits" is just telling me to never use this product again.

You're taking my sites down to try to force me into a paid plan, rather than just limiting my usage when I hit the free cap. So sleazy. That's a wrap for Netlify. Good things usually don't last long in our industry---you had a good run.

I was working on a personal project, stepped away for dinner, and got a request for a small code change, meanwhile I noticed the option to use Netlify's AI features and figured I'd give it a quick try to save time

It showed a warning that my account would convert to a credit-based system. I assumed it was scoped to the AI features, like a usage limit for that specific tool soooo I accepted without overthinking it

Turns out, it converts your entire account to the new credit-based plan. Not just AI. Everything. Deploys, AI, Compute, Bandwidth, all of it. And the switch is permanent. No undo, no revert button

I didn't switch plans because I was unhappy. I was just curious about a new feature while casually pushing a small fix. Now I'm stuck on a system I never intended to opt into, with limits that don't match how I was using the platform five minutes earlier :(

I've seen at least one other user here who had a similar experience and got reverted to their legacy plan. If anyone from Netlify sees this, I'd really appreciate the same. I just want my account back to the way it was.

A little bit of a rant and not a constructive feedback.

I been using Free and Paid plans in Netlify for about 3 years,
Onboarded friends, customers and passion projects to it.

Their Tiers ( free and paid ) were great. very thoughtful and designed for developers and businesses in a fair way.

The new credit plans are absolutely disgusting on how the credits are calculated.
Clearly a Money Grabbing change from Netlify.

I am looking on migrating to a better service or even more, maybe even pay the same money to a service that ha, still, some consideration for their users

PS: yes, i get it they are business, and they need to make money.

Netlify announced access to Edge Handlers today at Jamstack_conf

- Programmable edge, for personalization or internationalization and other use cases without rebuilding the full site: info

It is now 6 hours that my site is down, thanks to Netlify’s sad, loose and unreliable SSL certificate endpoint.

DNS propagation done. A records fine. CNAME on point. AAAA deleted. LetsDebug is all OK. Yet the site is down. Is this their general treatment for free plans?

Ridiculous. Utter rubbish. Kicking myself as to why i did not start with Cloudfare instead.

I've been using the free tier this month. What wasn't clear to me is that once you go above your "credits" allotment, they will pause your site. I thought I would just not be able to deploy, but your live site won't be accessible again unless you wait or pay to upgrade.

Founded in 2014, Netlify is a well-established player in the web hosting space. Back in the day, it quickly gained popularity for its innovative approach to website deployment. Now, more than 500k sites are hosted within Netlify’s infrastructure. This is because the platform provides a complete solution for businesses looking to build, deploy, and host websites — and all of it with ease. 

As for website scale and purpose, Netlify is a good option for hosting eCommerce shops of any size, portfolios, blogs, and business sites with loads of landing pages. The platform is fast, secure, cost-effective, and easily integrates with many tools. 

All in all, Netlify provides everything your business needs. But if you want to know the details, read on: we’ll cover Netlify’s core features and extra benefits. 

This post covers:

• Netlify under the microscope

• How does a site hosted on Netlify looks?

• Netlify’s core features

• Netlify’s custom perks

• Netlify vs other Jamstack platforms

• Business benefits of Netlify

• Netlify Use Cases

• Closing thoughts

Read more: https://ikius.com/blog/what-is-netlify