Vercel Workflows
Fully managed durable workflow platform: write async JS/TS/Python that pauses, sleeps, retries steps, and resumes across deploys and crashes — no queue or workers to run yourself.
- Card required
- No
Vercel Workflows scores 3.1/10 for free value in Schedulers. The main constraint: Hobby ($0/mo, no card): 50,000 Workflow Events/month and 1 GB Workflow Data Written/month included. Cron schedules unlimited, no max run duration, no max sleep duration. Underlying Vercel Functions/Queues compute is billed against normal Hobby limits.
Free value score
3.1 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
50,000 Workflow Events/month + 1 GB data written at $0, no credit card
Durable execution: per-step retries, deterministic replay, survives deploys and crashes
Pause for minutes to months with sleeps and external-event hooks — no max sleep duration
Built-in observability (logs, metrics, tracing) and unlimited cron schedules
Gotchas
- 50,000 events/month
Hobby includes 50,000 Workflow Events per month; every state transition is an event (a normal step produces step_created, step_started, step_completed, plus step_retrying on retries). On-demand overage is $0.02 per 1K events on paid plans. Resets monthly.
- 1 GB data written/month
Hobby includes 1 GB of Workflow Data Written per month (workflow state, event logs, and stream data). Overage is $0.50 per GB on paid plans.
- Data Retained not available on Hobby
Workflow Data Retained (billed $0.50 per GB-month on paid plans) is not available on Hobby; long-lived retained persistence requires Pro or Enterprise.
- 1-day state retention
Managed-persistence storage for a run is retained only 1 day after completion on Hobby (Pro 7 days, Enterprise 30 days). Not configurable by default without contacting support.
- Compute billed separately
Workflows run on Vercel Functions and are orchestrated by Vercel Queues; function compute (Active CPU 4 CPU-hrs, Function Invocations 1M, Function Duration 100 GB-hrs on Hobby) and Queues usage count against standard limits on top of the 50K events.
- 100K requests/minute
Hobby is capped at 100,000 Workflow API requests per minute (event creation, stream writes, and reads). Exceeding it does not fail runs — requests auto-retry with backoff, slowing throughput. Pro 1M/min, Enterprise 5M/min.
- 25,000 events per run
Each individual workflow run is capped at 25,000 events (and 10,000 steps). Runs above 2,000 events or 1 GB entity storage replay more slowly; split into child workflows for performance.
- 2 GB entity storage per run
Maximum total entity storage per run is 2 GB; max payload size is 50 MB and max stream chunk size is 10 MB.
- 240s max replay duration
Max workflow replay duration is 240 seconds; individual step runtime is bound by Vercel Functions limits (10s default, configurable up to 60s on Hobby).
- Personal / noncom only
The Hobby plan is restricted to noncom, personal use under Vercel's fair-use guidelines. Commercial use requires upgrading to Pro.
- 30-day lockout on overage
On Hobby there are no billing cycles; if you exceed an included usage limit you generally must wait until 30 days have passed before using the feature again (no metered overage).
Sources
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"Workflow Events | 50,000 events / month included | $0.02 per 1K events ... Workflow Data Written | 1 GB | $0.50 per GB ... Workflow Data Retained | — | $0.50 per GB-month"
https://vercel.com/docs/workflows/pricing -
"Events per run | 25,000 limit ... Steps per run | 10,000 ... Max payload size | 50 MB ... Maximum total entity storage per run | 2 GB ... Max workflow replay duration | 240s ... Maximum run duration | No limit ... Maximum sleep duration | No limit ... Schedules/cron | No limit"
https://vercel.com/docs/workflows/pricing -
"Plan | Requests per minute | Hobby | 100,000 | Pro | 1,000,000 | Enterprise | 5,000,000 ... hitting the rate limit will not cause your workflow to fail, but it will slow down the rate at which your workflows run."
https://vercel.com/docs/workflows/pricing -
"Since launching in beta in October 2025, Workflows has processed over 100 million runs and over 500 million steps across more than 1,500 customers, with more than 200K npm downloads every week. Today, Vercel Workflows is generally available."
https://vercel.com/blog/a-new-programming-model-for-durable-execution
