Netlify Doubled Credit Costs for Bandwidth and Compute
Published at Oct 11, 2026
Netlify moved to credit-based pricing in September 2025, and it has been tweaked since. The tweak that matters most happened on April 14, 2026, and I only caught it during my October price review. The hosting calculator now uses the new numbers.
The short version is that bandwidth and compute cost twice as many credits as before, and Pro now includes 3,000 credits. Seats on Pro got free in the same change, so how this lands depends on what you run.
What changed
From Netlify’s changelog entry on April 14, 2026, all credit plans:
| Meter | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 10 credits per GB | 20 credits per GB |
| Compute | 5 credits per GB-hour | 10 credits per GB-hour |
| Web requests | 3 credits per 10,000 | 2 credits per 10,000 |
| Form submissions | 1 credit each | Free |
| Production deploys | 15 credits each | 15 credits each |
Bandwidth and compute are the two meters that grow with traffic, and both doubled. Web requests got a bit cheaper and form submissions are free, but unless your site is mostly requests and almost no data, that will not make up for it.
The rate changes applied immediately to existing teams, not at renewal.
The Pro plan
Pro is now $20 per month for 3,000 credits, with unlimited team members. Before this change each seat cost $20, so a team with several developers will pay a lot less.
On the credits themselves, the launch announcement in September 2025 listed Pro as 5,000 credits for $20. The pricing page and the April changelog both say 3,000 now. The changelog does not call out the reduction, so I cannot tell you exactly when it happened, only that the two documents disagree.
What your credits buy now
Here is what a plan’s credits would cover if you spent all of them on bandwidth:
| Plan | Credits | Bandwidth before | Bandwidth now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 300 | 30 GB | 15 GB |
| Personal ($9) | 1,000 | 100 GB | 50 GB |
| Pro ($20) | 3,000 | 500 GB (5,000 credits) | 150 GB |
Nobody spends every credit on bandwidth, since builds, deploys and compute use credits too, so treat these as the ceiling. The old Pro plan, before credits, included 1 TB of bandwidth according to a thread on the Netlify forum, so this is a big step down from where Pro started.
Compute follows the same pattern. If you run server-side functions heavily, 3,000 credits now covers about 300 GB-hours instead of the 1,000 that 5,000 credits used to give.
Who wins and who loses
Winners
- Teams with several members, because seats are no longer billed.
- Sites that serve a lot of requests but little data, like APIs and light pages.
- Anyone using forms heavily.
Losers
- Image heavy sites, media sites and anything that ships large downloads, since bandwidth is the meter that doubled.
- Solo developers on Personal, where you only get half the traffic for the same $9.
- Anyone running a lot of server-side rendering or functions.
Netlify’s response on the forum is that the changes were modeled so that 98% of customers’ bills stay the same or go down, and that the meter adjustments target usage at scale. I have no reason to doubt that number for the average account, but it says very little about a specific site that happens to be bandwidth heavy.
What I would do
- Check your bandwidth number first. If your site uses well under 50 GB per month you will probably never notice. If it is above 100 GB, look at the numbers.
- Put big files somewhere with cheaper egress. Images, video and downloads are what break the credit math, and a CDN or object storage in front of them costs a lot less per GB. The S3 calculator compares the options.
- Run your own numbers in the hosting calculator. It models Netlify’s credits next to Vercel, Cloudflare and the others, so you can see where the break-even moved.
This is the cost of credit-based pricing. Credits make a plan look simple, but because the exchange rate is set by the vendor, a change to it is a price change that never shows up on the pricing page headline.