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Vercel cuts Hobby rollback depth from ten production deployments to three
Vercel's free Hobby plan now protects three production builds plus three deployments of any type, with anything else deleted the same day once a team passes the 10GB storage quota. Its head of pricing says few users will notice.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- Vercel's updated Deployment Retention Policy deletes older unprotected deployments immediately once a free-tier Hobby team exceeds its 10GB Deployment Storage allowance, ending the previous 30-day holding window.
- Every Hobby project, over the limit or not, now keeps only its three most recent production deployments plus its three most recent deployments of any type, down from ten production deployments.
- Hobby also loses the count-based preview protection that keeps the last 20 non-production Ready deployments on Pro and Enterprise, though the latest preview on an active Git branch stays protected on every plan.
- Deletion is not instantly permanent: successfully built deployments stay recoverable for 30 days from a project's Settings, under Security, Recently Deleted.
- Jas Garcha, Vercel's head of pricing, told The New Stack the platform now handles more than 10 million deployments a day, more than six times its volume a year ago.
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Why it matters
- constraint Rollback depth on Hobby is three production builds, so undoing a fourth-from-last release means rebuilding from Git instead of promoting a build that already exists.
- cost Keeping the old retention behavior now costs money. The route is the Pro plan, where storage past the included allowance is metered by the gigabyte-month.
- decision Anyone who kept old preview URLs alive on Hobby has to pick which ones to alias or park on an active branch, because those are the only protections left beyond the six newest builds.
- contradiction Garcha says few Hobby users will feel the effects, yet the shortened exception list applies to every Hobby project, including the ones nowhere near 10GB.
Deployment Storage on Hobby is a 10GB quota. Every build a project keeps uses part of it. "Every deployment you keep uses some of it, and going over the limit can block you from deploying until you free some up," Vercel wrote in its changelog [8]. Retention is how the space comes back. A deployment that is not on the exception list is eligible to go.
"Your current production deployment is never deleted, and aliased and active-branch deployments remain protected, along with each project's most recent deployments," Jas Garcha, Vercel's head of pricing, told The New Stack [7][21]. For a project already over the quota, the deletions now arrive sooner. So does the space. Under the old defaults that storage stayed locked up for as long as 30 days while the project sat blocked [2][8][9].
The paid tier keeps a longer list: the last 10 deployments created in a project, the last 20 production deployments in a Ready state, and the last 20 non-production ones [12]. Set against Hobby's three and three, that is seven more production builds and a full 20-deep window for previews [20][6]. Storage past Pro's included allowance bills at $0.10 per GB per month, so carrying 10GB of overage costs $1 a month and $12 a year [11][19].
Garcha said: "Our former retention defaults were designed for teams that ship constantly and need deep rollback history. They made less sense for Hobby projects, where dormant deployments were quietly consuming storage that active projects need." [14] He put current volume at more than 10 million deployments a day, more than a 6x increase year over year [15]. Divide the two and the platform was handling roughly 1.7 million deployments a day a year ago [18].
That figure counts deployments across the platform, not Hobby storage, and Vercel did not publish how many Hobby teams sit over the 10GB line. Garcha said few Hobby users will feel the effects [16]. For the change to be as quiet as that, most Hobby projects would have to hold no more than six deployments anyone still wants, or their older builds would have to be ones nobody will ask for again. Vercel's advice for staying under the limit includes reducing unnecessary deployment output [17].
What to watch
- Whether Vercel publishes the share of Hobby projects sitting over 10GB.
- Whether restoring a build from Recently Deleted counts against the 10GB quota while a team is still over it.
- Whether the three-and-three exception list migrates upward into Pro defaults in a later changelog.