Netlify Functions

Gotchas

• 300 credits/month (hard cap)

  Free tier gets 300 Netlify credits per month covering all usage (compute, deploys, bandwidth, requests); the cap is hard — sites pause when exhausted.

• ~30 GB-hours compute/month

  Function and edge function compute is billed at 10 credits/GB-hour, so the 300-credit pool yields roughly 30 GB-hours of serverless function runtime per cycle.

• ~1.5M web requests/month

  Web requests (including function invocations) consume 2 credits per 10k requests; using the full credit pool for requests alone gives about 1.5 million requests.

• ~15 GB bandwidth/month

  Bandwidth is charged at 20 credits/GB; spending the full 300 credits on bandwidth would yield 15 GB, but in practice credits are shared across all usage types.

• ~20 production deploys/month

  Each production deploy costs 15 credits, so the 300-credit pool supports approximately 20 production deploys per month if used exclusively for deploys.

• 24-hour log retention only

  Function and edge function logs are retained for only 24 hours on the free plan, making debugging production issues significantly harder.

• 1-day observability history

  Analytics, metrics, and observability data are limited to 1-day history on the free tier, versus 7-30 days on paid plans.

• Single team member

  The free plan is limited to 1 member seat; additional paid seats cannot be added on the free plan.

• No custom function deployment options

  Increased execution limits, custom memory, and custom AWS region for functions are paid-tier features only.

• 1 concurrent build

  Free tier allows only 1 concurrent build; additional concurrent builds require paid add-ons at $40 each.

• Basic Netlify Database only

  Free plan includes only the 'Basic' tier of the built-in Postgres database; relaxed and advanced tiers require paid plans.

• Site pauses when credits exhausted

  When the 300-credit monthly limit is hit, ALL projects on the account are paused until the next billing cycle or a plan upgrade — there is no graceful degradation.

• Not an always-on runtime

  Netlify Functions are event-driven serverless functions with cold starts; they are not suitable as persistent long-running agent or background runtimes.