I tried Netlify. I am already out, I think

This week, in Monday's prep post, I said I wanted to try Netlify. I was looking for Vercel alternatives, and Netlify came out on top of my list, mostly because ChatGPT said it was the closest match.

Read also: Comparing Vercel alternatives: can't tell half of them apart

Some surface-level digging backed that up, so I didn't push further. I didn't bother checking how their tiers worked. As far as I remembered, Netlify was on par with Vercel. That memory was outdated, and I was dead wrong.

Evening squeeze

I'm still in the middle of moving houses, so most days right now are split into pieces. This one was too. Morning was TWO Docs work. Afternoon was heavy lifting for the move. And before I did the moving, I just asked Claude Code to run the "scaffolding" for me for Random Facts so it's ready to go once I am back.

Evening was the plan I've been looking forward to: deploy Idea Bench #1 on Netlify so I could start comparing it to Vercel for real, not just on paper.

Deployment went too smoothly

I'd mapped out the basic design over the weekend.

I made the mockup in Claude, then did the final pass, pushed it through Claude Code and GitHub, and connected the repo to Netlify.

All of that went smoothly. Deployment was up in no time, and the draft was live. For about twenty minutes I thought this was going to be an easy fucking ride.

Then I saw the credits (sigh)

Then I looked at how their tiers work now. Every production deploy from GitHub costs credits, and the free plan gives you 300 a month, full stop, no rollover. Four deploys cost me 60 credits. That's 20% of the entire monthly budget gone before I'd written a single line of real content.

I'm not a developer. I rely on Claude to write the prompts I feed into Claude Code, and I can't just one-shot a build the way some devs seem to. That means I iterate. A lot.

Read also: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Kimi: how I labeled them and use them

Getting Idea Bench #1 from draft to something I'd call finished would take a few dozen passes easily, and at 15 credits per production deploy, I'd burn through the free tier before the MVP fucking existed. So I stopped. Immediately. And started writing this instead.

Turns out this wasn't some overnight change I just missed. Netlify moved to credit-based pricing for all new accounts back in September 2025.

I am a bit disappointed

I also stopped poking around under the hood after that, and not because I'm trying to cut corners. It's that I know exactly where this goes if I let it. I end up paying for things I never meant to pay for, on a tool I picked as a backup option, while my 168M challenge is already sitting in the negative. I don't need another item I didn't plan for.

I'm a bit disappointed. I wanted Netlify as a secondary deploy option, something to fall back on if Vercel ever got weird. After this tier change, it's just not built for how I work right now.

Cloudflare is next

Pulling up my old Vercel alternative notes, Cloudflare is the obvious next try, especially since the concept "Random Facts" is mostly static anyway. I'll give it a proper shot at the end of the week instead of tonight.

There's a small upside buried in all this. Knowing what I can rely on is worth something too. It's one less thing I have to second-guess when I want to ship instead of test.

Cloudflare already has that reputation. Globally recognized, and it's the name that keeps coming up whenever devs on Reddit talk about this stuff.

So I plan to disconnect from Netlify, run the same setup through Cloudflare, and write down what happens this time instead of assuming a tier page hasn't changed since I last looked at it.

Let's just say Netlify is not for me right now.