The real cost of a Vercel website for a small business (including the zero)

Every small business owner I speak to has heard the same sentence: Vercel hosting is free. And then immediately, sensibly, thought — yeah, there must be a catch.

There isn't one, but the sentence isn't the whole picture either. Here's the honest version.

─What £0/month actually covers

Vercel's Hobby tier, which handles a perfectly serious small-business website, gives you:

• Static hosting on a global edge network
• HTTPS and automatic certificate renewal
• A preview deployment for every code change
• 100 GB of bandwidth a month (enough for tens of thousands of visits)
• Serverless functions for contact forms and similar

For a consultant, clinician, coach, or small service business, that is all the hosting you will ever need. The phrase £0/month hosting is accurate. The site is genuinely free to keep online.

─What £0/month doesn't cover

There are four line items around the edges of "hosting" that people sometimes forget.

Domain name — £10 to £15 per year. Whoever you buy it from (Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap), this is roughly the same. Pay annually, forget about it, set auto-renew.

Business email — £0 to £60 per year. If you only need one inbox and you're comfortable on a free provider, that's £0. If you want you@yourbusiness.com with proper deliverability, Google Workspace is £5.20/month (£62.40/year) and worth it the first time your client's email goes to spam otherwise.

Form backend — £0. The contact form on this site goes straight into my inbox via a free tier on a third-party service. Unless you're collecting thousands of submissions a month, this stays at zero.

Analytics — £0. Plausible has a free tier, Vercel Analytics has one too, and Google Analytics is permanently free. All three do the job.

Total ongoing: £10 to £80 per year. Not £0, but close enough that the phrase holds up.

─Where the cost actually lives

The part of a website that costs real money is the part that gets made once, not the part you keep paying for.

A hand-built bespoke site from a small studio or indie developer typically runs £1,500 to £8,000, depending on complexity. A landing page is at the lower end; a multi-page service site with a blog and a bespoke animation pass is at the upper end.

That number looks bigger than Squarespace's £16/month until you put it next to a five-year horizon.

─Five-year total cost of ownership

Two honest scenarios for a UK service business that wants its own domain and proper email:

Bespoke site on Vercel (Landing package)

• Build (year 1): £1,800
• Domain × 5: £60
• Google Workspace × 5: £312
• Total: £2,172 over 5 years · ~£36/month amortised

Squarespace Business plan

• Build (year 1, DIY or light help): £400
• Squarespace × 5 years at £23/month: £1,380
• Domain included
• Google Workspace × 5: £312
• Total: £2,092 over 5 years · ~£35/month amortised

The numbers are almost identical. The difference isn't money. It's what you own at the end.

After five years on Squarespace you've rented a site. If you stop paying, it vanishes. After five years on Vercel you own the code, the content, the domain, and you've been paying a few pounds a year to keep it online. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow the site would keep working until the domain expired, and you could hand it to any developer on earth to edit.

─The real variable

What drives the actual cost of a small-business website isn't the hosting, it's the hours that go into making it feel like yours instead of like a template. That's where the build fee sits. It's also the part that changes whether people email you after visiting or quietly close the tab.

If that part matters to you — and for service businesses it usually matters more than owners realise — have a look at the three packages. Each one makes the £0/month hosting pitch true while being honest about where the time actually goes.

Thinking about moving off a templated platform? Start a project → · or tell me your setup: jonathanlai928@gmail.com