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Deploy a website — Vercel

A live link to your site in ~30 seconds, polished for modern web apps. Reach for Vercel when your thing is a real app — a dashboard, an interactive tool, anything built with Next.js — not just a flat page. The link is public the moment it's live; anyone you send it to just clicks.

Skip it for anything an organization runs: the free tier is personal, non-commercial use only — it counts a paid employee, ads, even asking for donations as commercial. Use Netlify or Cloudflare Pages there.

Last verified: 2026-06-07 · checked against vercel.com/docs · Confidence: high on the public-by-default model, the non-commercial rule, and Hobby caps.

It allows you to

  • Put a real app online, not just a page. Static page, dashboard, or a full Next.js app — Vercel builds it and serves it. [confirmed]
  • Gate a work-in-progress — but only preview versions, not the live site, on the free tier. See Who can get in. [confirmed]
  • The shared wins — one public link, no recipient account, update in place — are on the Deploy a website overview; below is just what Vercel adds.

Ideal for

  • A public reference site that's really a web app — LongtermWiki, an AI-safety prioritization resource of 400+ pages, served live at ea-crux-project.vercel.app — exactly Vercel's sweet spot.
  • A polished demo of an interactive tool — a forecasting calculator or model-comparison dashboard you want to show a collaborator today, on a clean link, not a screen-share.
  • A Next.js app you built with your agent — Vercel makes Next.js, so a "build me a small web app" project goes online with the fewest surprises.

Who can get in

  • Public by default. A freshly published site is open to anyone with the link — no members-only default. [confirmed]
  • The live site can't be gated on free. Vercel Authentication (the free protection method) makes visitors log in, but covers preview versions only — your live site stays public no matter what, and locking it down needs Pro. [confirmed]
  • One outside guest, and revoke isn't clean. Free gating holds a single external viewer; past that needs Pro. And turning protection off then back on lets anyone who logged in before stay in on their old cookie — don't treat the toggle as a clean cut-off. [confirmed]

Which rungs it can hold. Of the five rungs, free Vercel really holds only anyone with the link / the whole internet for a live site; named people works for previews only. → Who can see it? [confirmed]

Handing data to the host. Your files sit on Vercel's servers (US by default). One setting worth flipping: free accounts have AI-training on by default since March 2026 — the off-toggle and opt-out path are on the Vercel company entry. → Can you trust the company? [confirmed]

What you do to set it up

Tell Claude Code, in the folder that holds your site:

Log me into Vercel (vercel login), then deploy this folder to production
and give me the live URL.

Your agent runs vercel login (one browser click to approve), then vercel --prod, and hands you a *.vercel.app link in ~30 seconds. Every share after that is one sentence. [confirmed]

  • One-time, in order:
    1. Set up Claude Code — runs the rest, ~10 min once.
    2. A free Vercel account — the one un-delegable step; your agent can't click signup. ~3 min once. [estimate]
  • Rather click? Vercel's dashboard has a drag-and-drop / Git-import path, no terminal. [confirmed]

Vercel makes you log in before it'll put anything online. Want a live URL with no signup at all? Netlify puts a site up anonymously first — see Deploy a website with your agent.

What the other person does

Same as any deployed site — click, it runs, no account, free to view (overview). The one Vercel wrinkle:

  • See a gated preview (rare — only if you turned on Vercel Authentication): log in with a free Vercel account, and you approve them once. One outside guest max on free. [confirmed]

Other ways to share

  • Doing this for an org, a nonprofit, or anything that takes donations? → Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. Vercel's free tier is personal, non-commercial only; neither of the others draws that line.
  • Need a real server-side database or background jobs the free tier won't run? → Fly.io runs a full backend; reach for it once a static-style host isn't enough.
  • Only named people should get in? → a Gated website puts a sign-in wall on it. Weighing all the hosts → the Deploy a website overview.

Sources

Good to know

  • Free = non-commercial, personal use only — the big gotcha (covered in the blurb). It counts a paid employee, ads, even asking for donations as commercial; org/nonprofit work belongs on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. [confirmed] (fair-use guidelines)
  • No spend cap on free — it pauses instead. Blow past a limit (e.g. 100 GB transfer/month) and "you will have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use the feature again"; a traffic burst can take a free site down. (Auto-pause/alerts are Pro-only.) [confirmed] (Hobby plan)
  • Free Hobby caps: 100 GB transfer and 1M invocations/month, 200 projects, 100 deploys/day, 100 MB per upload — plenty for a demo. Re-check at vercel.com/pricing. [confirmed] (limits)
  • Default *.vercel.app URL and the custom-domain step: shared across hosts, in the deploy walkthrough.