If you’re shipping a new site — a blog, an AI tools directory, a small SaaS — the two defaults are Firebase Hosting and Vercel. Both have free tiers, both are indie-friendly, and most comparisons stop there with a vague “it depends.” This one names numbers and flags the one rule that quietly changes the answer: as of June 2026, Vercel’s free Hobby plan is non-commercial only, while Firebase Hosting’s free Spark plan has no such restriction. If you’ve never touched either, What is Firebase Hosting? and What is Vercel? are the two-minute primers.
TL;DR
- Building a money page (ads, affiliate, SaaS, client work)? Vercel’s free Hobby tier forbids commercial use, so your real Vercel cost is $20/seat/month (Pro). Firebase Hosting’s Spark free tier allows commercial use. For a static content site that earns money, Firebase Hosting is the cheaper honest answer.
- Building a Next.js app with edge functions, ISR, and PR previews? Vercel Pro is worth the $20 — nobody runs Next.js better than the company that makes it.
- Hobby project, no revenue, framework-agnostic? Either free tier is fine. Vercel gives 100 GB/month bandwidth; Firebase gives 10 GB/month plus 10 GB storage.
The numbers that actually decide it (June 2026)
| What you pay attention to | Firebase Hosting (Spark, free) | Vercel (Hobby, free) | Vercel Pro ($20/seat/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly bandwidth included | 10 GB/month | 100 GB/month | 1 TB fast data transfer |
| Static storage included | 10 GB | Not metered the same way | — |
| Bandwidth overage | $0.15/GB (Blaze) | Hard-capped, site pauses | $0.15/GB |
| Commercial use allowed? | Yes | No (personal only) | Yes |
| Serverless duration cap | Cloud Functions, separate billing | 60s max | 300s (5 min) max |
| Build minutes/month | Generous (Cloud Build) | 6,000 | 24,000 |
| Custom domains | 1 site per domain, 20 subdomains/apex | 50 per project | Unlimited |
| Deploys/day | Unmetered in practice | 100 | 6,000 |
Sources: Firebase Hosting usage & pricing and the Vercel Hobby plan docs. The non-commercial rule lives in Vercel’s Fair Use Guidelines.
The catch nobody mentions: Vercel Hobby is non-commercial
This is the single most important line in this article. Vercel’s Fair Use Guidelines define commercial use broadly: any deployment used for financial gain of anyone involved in producing it. That covers running ads, affiliate links, a paid SaaS, sponsored open source, and even unpaid client work. Accepting donations is the only carve-out.
So if you’re reading a “money page” guide and planning to monetize, the honest Vercel price is not $0 — it’s $20/seat/month for Pro. Firebase Hosting’s Spark tier has no such clause; a static content site running AdSense or affiliate links stays free until you exceed the 10 GB/month transfer quota, after which Blaze bills $0.15 per additional GB.
For a content site earning a few hundred dollars a month, 10 GB of monthly transfer is often plenty — a well-optimized Astro page is ~150 KB, so 10 GB is roughly 65,000 page views before any bill. That is the math that makes Firebase Hosting the quiet winner for indie content sites.
When Firebase Hosting wins
- Static content sites (Astro, Hugo, Eleventy) that you intend to monetize. See the Firebase Hosting go-live checklist before launch.
- Projects already on the Firebase stack — Auth, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging. Hosting + the rest of Firebase under one bill and one CLI.
- All-Google workflows: content + AdSense + Search Console, kept in one ecosystem.
- You want one command to ship.
firebase deploybuilds and pushes in a single step. The Firebase Hosting free tier note covers exactly what’s free.
Firebase’s free quota is small (10 GB storage, 10 GB/month transfer) but it allows revenue. For most indie content sites, that trade is correct.
When Vercel wins
- Next.js, SvelteKit, Nuxt — their home turf. The Vercel deploy Astro and Vercel deploy Next.js guides show the smallest viable setups.
- Apps that need ISR, Edge Functions, or built-in image optimization. Vercel’s serverless functions run up to 300 seconds on Pro versus 60 seconds on Hobby; Firebase pushes you to Cloud Functions as a separate product.
- GitHub-PR-preview-heavy teams. Every pull request gets a live URL automatically — still best-in-class. The Vercel content-site go-live checklist covers the production pass.
- Sites stitched from third-party APIs (Stripe, Resend, Upstash). Vercel’s edge runtime and environment-variable UX make this friction-free.
If your project is a commercial Next.js app, you are paying $20/seat/month regardless — and at that point Vercel earns it.
Deploy experience, head to head
| Dimension | Firebase Hosting | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| First deploy | firebase init then firebase deploy | Connect GitHub repo, push |
| Ongoing deploys | Re-run firebase deploy or wire up GitHub Actions | Auto-deploy on every push |
| Preview URLs | firebase hosting:channel:deploy (manual) | Automatic per-PR previews |
| Rollback | One click in console, or redeploy a prior release | One click to promote any prior deployment |
| Serverless | Cloud Functions (separate setup + billing) | API routes / Edge Functions built in |
| Best-fit framework | Astro, Vite, static-output frameworks | Next.js-first, framework-agnostic otherwise |
Vercel’s git-push-to-deploy and automatic previews are genuinely smoother out of the box. Firebase trades that polish for a free tier you can legally monetize.
Does the host affect SEO?
Short answer: no, not in any way that matters. Both serve from a global CDN over HTTP/2 with free automatic HTTPS, and both let you control sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, and redirects. Google ranks pages on content, structure, crawlability, and Core Web Vitals — not on whether the bytes came from Firebase or Vercel. Two caveats worth knowing:
- Cache behavior differs. Firebase counts both cache hits and misses toward your transfer quota, so a viral page eats your 10 GB faster than you’d expect.
- Vercel’s image optimization can lift your Largest Contentful Paint on image-heavy pages, which indirectly helps the Core Web Vitals signal — but you can get the same result with pre-optimized images on Firebase.
My actual split
- Monetized static content site (like this AI tools guide): Firebase Hosting. Free tier permits ads, and 10 GB/month covers tens of thousands of views.
- Full-stack product needing auth + a database: the whole Firebase stack — Hosting + Auth + Firestore + Cloud Functions on one bill.
- Commercial Next.js app with edge logic and heavy PR previews: Vercel Pro. You’re paying $20/seat either way, so take the best Next.js host.
FAQ
Is Vercel really free for a site that runs ads? No. Vercel’s Fair Use Guidelines restrict the free Hobby plan to non-commercial, personal use, and running ads or affiliate links counts as commercial. A monetized site needs Vercel Pro at $20/seat/month. Firebase Hosting’s free Spark tier has no commercial-use restriction.
How much traffic does Firebase Hosting’s free tier actually cover? The Spark plan includes 10 GB of data transfer per month (as of June 2026). For a lean Astro site at roughly 150 KB per page, that’s around 65,000 page views before Blaze billing kicks in at $0.15 per additional GB. Note that Firebase counts both CDN cache hits and misses toward that quota.
Can I move a static site from Vercel to Firebase Hosting later?
Yes, easily. A static build (Astro, Hugo, Vite output) is just files. Point firebase.json at your build output directory, run firebase deploy, then move your DNS. The main gotcha is the custom-domain handoff — see why a custom domain works on Vercel but not Firebase for the ownership-verification differences.
Which is faster for a static site? Effectively tied. Both serve from a global CDN with automatic HTTPS. Real-world speed is decided by your asset sizes, caching headers, and framework output — not the host. Vercel’s built-in image optimization is the one edge for image-heavy pages.
What about serverless functions? Vercel bundles serverless and edge functions into the same project (60s max duration on Hobby, up to 300s on Pro). Firebase keeps Cloud Functions as a separate product with its own setup and Blaze billing, but its free tier includes 2 million invocations per month — generous for a side project.
Bottom line
Don’t burn a month picking a platform. For a monetized static content site, Firebase Hosting is the correct default — free tier, commercial use allowed, dead-simple firebase deploy. For a commercial Next.js app, you’re on Vercel Pro at $20/seat/month anyway, so take the host built for the framework. When something breaks, the Firebase Hosting failed and Vercel build failed notes cover the usual causes; for post-launch domain and SSL issues, see custom domain SSL delay.