Vercel adds free Speed Insights tier for all plans with 10,000 events per 30 days

Vercel has introduced a free tier for Speed Insights, its real-user performance monitoring product, opening a high-level view of live site performance to every plan and any number of projects. According to the Vercel changelog, the free tier includes 10,000 events per team every 30 days.

How the free tier works

The free tier now applies across all Vercel plans rather than being tied to the Hobby tier. That resolves a quirk of the previous arrangement: free Speed Insights was limited to a single project on Hobby, and moving up to Pro meant losing it entirely unless the team paid for the add-on. Vercel says the free allowance now carries over between plans, and charges only apply if a team opts into the paid product, which has been renamed Speed Insights Plus.

For existing paying customers, only the branding changes. Vercel states that capabilities and pricing stay exactly as they were under the new Plus name.

What Speed Insights measures

Speed Insights reports how real visitors experience a site, drawing on live traffic rather than the controlled conditions of lab testing. The free tier surfaces a high-level overview of that real-user data.

Speed Insights Plus layers on deeper diagnostics. Vercel lists slow-route diagnosis and detailed breakdowns for locating where pages get slow, plus historical data for tracking performance trends over time. Plus subscribers also gain access to Drains and the Vercel CLI, which allow performance data to be moved and worked with outside the dashboard.

Getting started

To begin collecting data, Vercel says to install the @vercel/speed-insights package in a project. Results can then be viewed in the Speed Insights dashboard.

Why it matters

Real-user monitoring answers a question lab tests cannot: how a site actually performs for visitors on their own devices and networks. Until now, Vercel's packaging meant a team that outgrew Hobby either paid for that visibility or gave it up, making the upgrade path actively worse for performance awareness. Removing the single-project limit and the loss-on-upgrade behaviour turns real-user data into a default part of the platform rather than a paid extra.

The 10,000-event allowance per team per 30 days should comfortably cover small projects, but on high-traffic sites with many projects sharing one team quota it could fill quickly, and the changelog does not specify what happens once the cap is reached. Teams in that position will need to weigh Speed Insights Plus, whose historical data and route-level diagnosis are the features most likely to matter when tracking down regressions. For everyone else, including hobbyists and teams that never had performance instrumentation, the change lowers the cost of finding out how their site really behaves in production to essentially zero.