"Free hosting" and "$20 a month" can describe the exact same kind of website, depending on which platform and which features you're comparing. Here's what actually drives the price.
Free tiers are real, but they come with fine print
Several major static hosts genuinely offer a usable free tier — the catch is usually in what "free" allows, not whether it exists. Vercel's free Hobby plan, for instance, includes 100GB of bandwidth a month but is restricted to personal, non-commercial projects under its terms. Netlify's free plan runs on a monthly credit allowance (300 credits, roughly enough for about 20 production deploys) rather than a simple bandwidth number. Cloudflare Pages' free tier, by contrast, doesn't cap bandwidth at all — though like any "unlimited" claim, it's still bound by a fair-use policy for extreme cases.
Read what "free" actually restricts — commercial use, bandwidth, or something else — not just whether the number is $0.
What you're paying for once you go past free
Paid tiers on most hosts charge for some mix of: bandwidth beyond the free allowance, team seats (some platforms charge per person, not per site), build minutes, and advanced features like password-protected pages or detailed analytics. Vercel's Pro plan, for example, is priced per user at $20/month — a five-person team pays for five seats, not one flat site fee. Netlify's Pro plan works differently: $20/month covers the whole organization with unlimited members, but usage above the included credit allowance costs extra.
That per-seat-versus-per-site distinction matters more than the headline number. A tool priced for engineering teams often assumes you're paying for multiple developers, not one designer hosting one client's site.
Where traditional hosting fits in
Traditional web hosting — the kind with a control panel, a database, and PHP running behind the scenes — is priced for a different job. It typically starts cheap ($3-10/month is common) but assumes you're running software like WordPress that needs a server to generate every page. For a static site with no database, that's infrastructure you're paying for and never using.
Where sofast fits
sofast is priced around the fact that a static site doesn't need a database, a server region, or a control panel built for software you're not running.
Insert final pricing tiers here once confirmed — currently unconfirmed in project notes. Frame around: free tier for one site, paid tiers scaling with number of sites and custom domains, no per-seat pricing since most freelancers and small agencies aren't paying for a "team" the way an engineering org would.
Frequently asked questions
Depends on the host. Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages, for example, have no time limit on their free tiers — they're free indefinitely, within their usage limits. Others use a free tier mainly to get you trying the product before usage grows past the free allowance.
Because they're built primarily for engineering teams, where more developers means more value from collaboration features like preview deployments and shared environments. That model doesn't map well onto a solo freelancer or a small agency hosting client sites, where the "team" using the host might just be one person.
A bandwidth limit caps how much data your site can serve per month before you're charged extra or throttled. "Unlimited" claims are usually still governed by a fair-use policy behind the scenes — genuinely unlimited for normal traffic, but not a blank check for extreme cases like video streaming.
Generally yes, since a static host isn't running a database or server-side code on every page view — the infrastructure required is simpler, and that's usually reflected in the price.
The main ones to watch for are commercial-use restrictions (some free tiers are personal-project-only) and usage overage charges once you exceed the included bandwidth or build minutes — read the terms for both before committing a client site to a free tier.
On most modern static hosts, no — automatic SSL is standard and included, not an upsell. See our guide on SSL certificates, explained without the jargon for what that actually covers.
If you've already got a site built with an AI tool, here's exactly how to get it hosted and see the real numbers for yourself.
