Free static hosting for a monetized site: GitHub Pages vs Cloudflare Pages vs Vercel
If you're hosting a static site that'll eventually carry ads or affiliate links, the free tier you pick matters more than it looks — two of the three popular options restrict or outright forbid commercial use at the free tier, and it's easy to miss until you get a warning email.
Vercel Hobby: commercial use is against the terms, not just "usage-based pricing"
Vercel's Hobby plan is explicitly for non-commercial, personal projects. Per their terms and fair-use policy, the moment a project carries ads, a paid plan, or otherwise generates revenue, it's out of compliance with Hobby and needs the Pro plan ($20/month per team member). Limits aside (100GB "Fast Data Transfer", 45-minute build cap, 1M function invocations), this one is disqualifying on its own for an ad-supported site: you'd be violating the terms from the day AdSense is switched on.
GitHub Pages: free, generous, but the policy language is a gray area
- Soft bandwidth limit: 100GB/month
- Site size cap: 1GB
- Soft build limit: 10 builds/hour (unless you use a custom GitHub Actions workflow instead of the built-in Pages build)
GitHub's own docs say Pages "is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at... facilitating commercial transactions." An ad-supported content/blog site isn't really "primarily directed at" transactions the way a storefront is, and plenty of ad-monetized blogs run on Pages without issue in practice — but the wording is vague enough that it's not a clean guarantee the way Cloudflare's answer is.
Cloudflare Pages: the safe default for this use case
- Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited sites, no credit card required
- 500 builds/month, 100 custom domains per project
- Cloudflare's own community team has stated plainly that both commercial and non-commercial use are fine on the free tier — no Hobby-style carve-out, no "primarily directed at" ambiguity
The call
For a site that's explicitly built to carry ads/affiliate links from day one: Cloudflare Pages is the only one of the three with an unambiguous "yes" on commercial use and a free tier generous enough (unlimited bandwidth) to not need a plan upgrade later. That's why it's the default for this project's content pipeline.
Sources: Vercel Terms of Service and Vercel Hobby plan docs (fair-use/commercial-use restriction); GitHub Pages usage limits and commercial-use policy; Cloudflare Pages pricing page and Cloudflare Community staff responses confirming commercial-use is permitted on the free tier.