Vercel now deletes over-limit Hobby deployments immediately, and keeps 3 recent per project instead of 10
Image: Vercel
Why it mattersA Hobby project sitting near 10GB will now lose rollback history without a grace period, so any team relying on old deployments for a manual rollback or a staging URL should upgrade to Pro or delete unused deployments before the next push takes the project past the 10GB limit.
Vercel updated the retention rules on its free Hobby plan on 16 September. The changelog entry, written by Jay Gengelbach and Pranav Kanchi, keeps the 10GB Deployment Storage limit in place but changes what happens when a Hobby team reaches it: deployments outside a small set of exceptions are now removed immediately, where before the free tier held onto them for 30 days.
What every Hobby project now keeps
Every Hobby project now retains its 3 most recent production deployments and its 3 most recent deployments of any type, regardless of age. The previous Hobby exception held the 10 most recent production deployments. The cut applies to every free-tier project, whether or not the team is over the storage limit.
The current production deployment is never deleted. Aliased deployments and the latest preview deployment on an active Git branch are still protected on every plan. What Hobby lost is the count-based preview exception: Pro and Enterprise teams still keep their last 20 non-production deployments in a Ready state, and that guarantee no longer covers Hobby.
The 30-day window is gone for teams over 10GB
For a Hobby team above the 10GB storage limit, the 30-day holding window is also gone. Anything outside the exceptions above is deleted the moment it becomes older or lower-priority than what the project needs to keep. Vercel notes in its docs that going over the limit can block new deployments until storage is freed, so a team that was relying on the 30-day window to work through cleanup now has to do that work first.
Why Vercel says it changed the rules
Vercel product manager Pranav Garcha told The New Stack that Hobby-tier deployment volume has grown enough to make the old defaults expensive to keep. According to Garcha, Vercel now handles more than 10 million deployments a day, a more than 6x increase year over year. He described the previous retention as designed for teams that ship constantly and need deep rollback history, and said dormant deployments in inactive Hobby projects were consuming storage that active projects need.
Garcha also linked the change to keeping the Hobby tier as a permanent free plan. He said Vercel has kept expanding the plan over time, and that sending storage to people who are actively building is what lets the company continue to offer it.
The Pro plan keeps its previous retention behaviour and still lists storage overage at $0.10 per GB per month.
For a solo developer or a small side project, the practical shift is that the deployment you rolled back to two months ago may no longer be there. If a project depends on old deployments as a rollback path, the options are to move the project to Pro, prune deployment output so it fits inside 10GB, or set an alias to any older deployment that must remain.
Source
Source: Vercel
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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