frontend platform

Netlify

Netlify is a deployment platform for static sites and frontend frameworks. This profile covers what it does, how it is priced, and where it stops being the right choice.

What the product actually does

Netlify popularised the idea that a frontend should be a build artefact deployed to a CDN rather than a server. Connect a repository and every push produces a deploy; every branch produces a deploy preview with its own URL. Forms, identity, and functions are offered as add-ons rather than requirements.

The build pipeline is the centre of the product. Build minutes, build concurrency and the cache between builds are what determine whether a team is comfortable or throttled, and they are the numbers to look at before anything else.

How pricing works once you are inside

The tiers price on seats plus build minutes, bandwidth and function invocations. The free tier is genuinely usable for a personal site and stops being usable the moment a team shares it, because seats are the first wall.

Bandwidth is the metered item that catches people. A site serving large images or video will exceed the included allowance long before its build minutes matter, and the overage rate is per gigabyte rather than a flat fee.

Where it breaks down

Netlify Functions are short-lived and stateless by design. Anything needing a database connection pool, a long job or an in-memory cache has to reach for an external service, and the latency of that reach is visible to users.

Build times also grow with the site. A large monorepo with many pages can take longer to build than the team is willing to wait on every push, and the answer — incremental builds — works best with the frameworks Netlify has invested in.

What switching costs

Low for the output, moderate for the workflow. Deploy previews, form handling and split testing are Netlify-specific and do not travel.

Sources

Netlify public documentation and pricing page, read October 2026.