The first question clients ask after hearing a site is self-hosted is usually some version of: "How much does all this cost to run?" The honest answer for a small marketing site is often nothing, at least to start. The three services that power a Slim Minima site all have free plans generous enough to run a real site with real traffic.
The question is not whether the free tier works. It is where it runs out.
This article gives you the actual numbers and what they mean in plain terms. No technical background needed. Figures came from the official pricing pages of each service, checked in June 2026.
What the three services actually do
Before the numbers, a plain-English version of what each service is for.
Vercel is where your website lives on the internet. When someone types your web address into their browser, Vercel is the service that sends them your pages. Think of it as the building your website operates from.
Neon Postgres is your database, which is the filing cabinet that holds all your content. Every page you create, every blog post you write, every meta description you fill in, it all lives in Neon. When someone visits your site, Neon hands the content to Vercel, which then sends it to the visitor's browser.
Cloudinary is where your images live. Every photo you upload to the site goes to Cloudinary, which stores it and delivers it to your visitors. It also automatically shrinks and optimizes images so they load faster, without you having to do anything.
Together, these three handle hosting, content, and media. A Slim Minima site needs all three to work. All three have free plans that are worth taking seriously.
Vercel: what 100 GB of bandwidth actually means
The Vercel Hobby plan (their free tier) gives you 100 GB of data transfer per month.
Data transfer, or bandwidth, is the total amount of data Vercel sends to your visitors each month. Every time someone loads a page on your site, a small amount of data travels from Vercel's servers to their browser.
Here is how to put 100 GB in perspective. A typical page on a Slim Minima site weighs around 50 to 150 KB when it arrives at the visitor's browser. Images are handled by Cloudinary, so they never count against Vercel's 100 GB. After the first visit, browsers also cache a lot of the page code, so repeat visitors cost very little bandwidth.
At those numbers, 100 GB of monthly bandwidth covers roughly:
- 50,000 to 150,000 page views per month
Most small business marketing sites see somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 monthly visitors. You would need to grow considerably before the Vercel free tier became a constraint.
The free plan also includes 1 million page requests per month. At 1 million, you have room for over 30,000 daily visitors before it matters. For the vast majority of small sites, the Vercel free tier is effectively unlimited in practice.
When you would upgrade: when you consistently have more than 30,000 to 50,000 monthly visitors, or when you need features like longer activity logs and custom deployment controls.
Neon Postgres: how many pages fit in 500 MB
Neon's free tier gives your site 500 MB of database storage.
To understand what 500 MB means for a real site, think about what lives in the database. Every page you create stores its title, the full text of the page, the meta title and meta description that appear in Google, any tags, the URL slug, and a handful of other details. A generous estimate for all of that on a single, content-heavy page is about 200 KB.
At 200 KB per page:
- 500 MB holds around 2,500 pages or blog posts
A marketing site with 20 to 50 pages and a blog with 100 posts uses maybe 30 MB of that. A prolific blogger publishing three posts a week for two years would have around 300 posts, using about 60 MB. You are unlikely to come close to the storage limit on any normal marketing or content site.
One thing worth knowing: Neon's free tier pauses the database after 5 minutes of no activity to save resources. When someone visits your site after a quiet period, the database wakes up, which takes about half a second. For most pages on a Slim Minima site this is invisible, because pages load from a cache rather than hitting the database on every visit. You would only notice it occasionally in the admin panel.
When you would upgrade: not for storage reasons on a typical site. You would upgrade if you need automatic backups, the ability to restore the database to an earlier point in time, or higher-reliability infrastructure for a large, active site.
Cloudinary: 25 GB of image storage
Cloudinary's free plan gives you 25 GB of storage and a monthly credit allowance that covers both image delivery and on-the-fly image editing.
Storage is the easy part. A high-quality hero image uploaded at full size typically weighs 300 to 600 KB. At 500 KB per image:
- 25 GB holds around 50,000 images
A typical marketing site might use 100 to 300 images across all its pages. Even a media-heavy site with 1,000 images would use less than 1 GB of the 25 GB available. Storage alone is not something you will run out of any time soon.
The part to pay more attention to is delivery bandwidth, which is how much data Cloudinary sends to your visitors when they load images. This is where the monthly credit allowance comes in. Cloudinary measures your combined storage and delivery usage against a monthly credit budget. On the free plan, that budget covers roughly 25 GB of image delivery per month.
Cloudinary automatically compresses and resizes images for each visitor's device, so images are typically delivered at 60 to 80 percent smaller than the original file size. A hero image that was uploaded at 500 KB might be delivered at 80 KB. At that size, 25 GB of monthly delivery covers around 300,000 individual image loads.
For a page with three images and 30,000 monthly visitors, that is comfortably within the free tier.
When you would upgrade: when your site has more than 30,000 to 50,000 monthly visitors and image-heavy pages, or when you need higher delivery bandwidth for video.
How the three fit together
The realistic ceiling for the full free stack on a Slim Minima site is around 10,000 to 30,000 monthly visitors, depending on how image-heavy the pages are. Below that number, none of the three services will cause you problems.
The limits on each service are also independent. You might need to upgrade Cloudinary before you need to upgrade Vercel. You are unlikely to need to upgrade Neon for storage reasons on a typical site at all. That is actually useful, because it means you pay for only what you have outgrown, not everything at once.
For a small business, a portfolio, or a content site that is just getting started, the free stack is a real starting point. Not a trial, not a stripped-down demo. A working site with real hosting, a real database, and real image delivery, at no cost.
The one thing you do pay for is a domain name, the web address that visitors type to reach your site. Registrars like Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare Registrar sell domains starting at around two to three dollars a year for common extensions, and sometimes less. That is the only unavoidable cost to get a Slim Minima site live on its own address.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to pay anything to start a Slim Minima site? The hosting, database, and image storage are all free to start. The one cost you cannot avoid is a domain name, which is the web address visitors use to find your site. Domain registrars like Namecheap, Porkbun, and Cloudflare Registrar sell common domains starting at around two to three dollars a year, sometimes less. Beyond that, you only pay when you grow past the free tier limits on one of the three services.
How many monthly visitors can the free stack handle? Comfortably around 10,000 monthly visitors, with room to push toward 30,000 before any of the three services becomes a concern. Vercel's 100 GB monthly bandwidth and 1 million monthly requests are the limits most likely to come first.
How many blog posts can I store on Neon's free plan? At a generous estimate of 200 KB per post (covering full page text, all metadata, and schema), 500 MB holds around 2,500 posts. A marketing blog with 50 to 200 posts uses a small fraction of that.
Will my site go down if the database pauses on Neon's free tier? No. Most page loads on a Slim Minima site are served from Vercel's cache, so they do not need the database at all. The database only needs to be active when loading the admin panel or when a page has very fresh content. The wake-up delay is around half a second and goes unnoticed in normal use.
When do I actually need to start paying? Vercel: once you are consistently above 30,000 to 50,000 monthly visitors. Neon: when you need point-in-time backup and restore, or private networking for compliance reasons. Cloudinary: when image-heavy pages and traffic consistently push past 25 GB of monthly image delivery.
Related reading
- Why I built Slim Minima
- Is Slim Minima secure? CMS security explained
- Why WordPress does not work well in the AI age
My verdict
The free stack is not a compromise. For a small business site, a portfolio, or a blog getting started, it is the right choice. You are not trading quality for cost at this scale. When you do grow past the free tiers, you upgrade one service at a time based on which limit you actually hit, not the whole platform at once.