Vercel's Hobby Tier Now Deletes Deployments After 30 Days

Vercel officially announced on Monday, April 27, 2026, that hobby projects will now default to a 30-day deployment retention (vercel.com). This policy means any deployment on the hobby tier older than 30 days will be automatically deleted, a significant shift from the previous indefinite retention.

What this means for a one-person operator is a direct impact on platform risk and resource management. If you've been using Vercel's hobby tier to host long-lived prototypes, archives of past iterations, or even just old staging environments that you occasionally link to, those deployments will now disappear without intervention. This forces you to be more proactive about what you keep on the platform.

To address this, you should immediately review all your Vercel hobby projects and identify any deployments critical for your product or workflow that are older than 30 days. For any essential older builds, consider upgrading that specific project to a paid Vercel plan, or set up an external archiving solution, like storing build artifacts on S3, before the automatic deletion occurs.

This change specifically targets the free "Hobby" tier, which many indie hackers leverage for initial MVPs, side projects, and experimental builds. Vercel's move aims to optimize its infrastructure by shedding inactive data and focusing resources on active development.

For solo founders whose projects often evolve from a hobby into a revenue-generating product, this policy change reinforces the need to plan for a paid tier or an alternative hosting solution with appropriate retention policies early in the project lifecycle. It's a clear signal about the intended use and limitations of the free tier for long-term archiving.