Lesson 1 of 6 · about 10 minutes
The Hobby plan, your account, and the CLI
The win You type vercel whoami and your terminal answers with your username. Everything later in the course runs through that login.
Vercel turns a Git repository into a running website. You push code; it builds the code and serves the result at a URL. The Hobby plan lets you do that for free, inside limits worth knowing before you build on it.
What Hobby gives you
Vercel describes Hobby as “free and aimed at developers with personal projects, and small-scale applications.” Five of its limits shape a first app:
| Resource | Hobby allowance |
|---|---|
| Projects | 200 |
| Deployments per day | 100 |
| Function invocations per month | 1,000,000 |
| Longest a single function may run | 300 s |
| Runtime logs kept | 1 hour |
A weekend prototype will not come near these. The one-hour log window is the limit you will feel first: if something breaks, look at the logs straight away.
Three rules that bite
Hobby is for non-commercial, personal use only. Vercel's examples of commercial use include requesting or processing payment from visitors, advertising the sale of a product or service, and showing adverts. Asking for donations does not count. A beachhead app usually exists to become a business, so decide now: build and learn on Hobby, and move the project to Pro before it takes money.
Exceeding a limit pauses the feature. There is no bill. In most cases “you will have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use the feature again.”
Private organization repositories are out. A private repository on your own GitHub account deploys fine. A private repository owned by a GitHub organization does not deploy to Hobby. Keep the beachhead repository under your personal account.
Do it
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Create the account. Go to vercel.com/signup and sign up with GitHub. Signing up with a Git provider makes it “the default login connection on your account,” and it is the provider you will import the app from in Lesson 2. If you are asked to pick a plan, pick Hobby.
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Check Node. The Vercel CLI needs Node.js 18 or newer; Next.js, which you will use next lesson, needs 20.9 or newer.
node --version -
Install the CLI.
npm i -g vercel -
Log in. Follow the prompts; a browser window confirms the login.
vercel login -
Prove it.
vercel whoamiYour username comes back. That is the win.
Check yourself
Answer from memory before you scroll back up. Getting one wrong and then reading why is the part that makes it stick.
Your beachhead app starts taking payments from visitors. Under Vercel's fair use guidelines, that deployment on Hobby is…
“Any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors of the site” is on Vercel's list of commercial usage, and “all commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan.” Traffic and revenue size do not enter into it. Source
You use up a Hobby allowance mid-month. In most cases, what happens next?
Hobby has no billing cycle, so there is nothing to bill. “You will have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use the feature again.” Source
Which of these can a Hobby team deploy from?
The restriction is on private repositories owned by a GitHub organization, GitLab group or Bitbucket workspace. Your own private repositories are fine. Source
How long can one Vercel Function run on Hobby before Vercel terminates it?
On Hobby both the default and the maximum are 300 seconds. 800 seconds is the Pro maximum. This matters in Lesson 4, because a slow LLM call runs inside a function. Source
Read this Vercel Hobby Plan is one page and takes five minutes. Read the comparison table against Pro; it tells you exactly what you would be buying if the beachhead works.
Ask your teacher Stuck on a login prompt, or unsure whether your idea counts as commercial? Ask in the Claude Code session you started this course from. That is what it is there for.