What changed
On September 16, 2026, Vercel changed Deployment Retention for Hobby teams. Each Hobby project now keeps its three most recent production deployments and its three most recent deployments of any type regardless of age. Preview deployments no longer receive their own protected allocation. Current production, aliased deployments and deployments on active branches remain protected. Most importantly, when a Hobby team is over its shared 10GB Deployment Storage limit, deployments outside the protected exceptions are now deleted immediately rather than being retained for another 30 days.
Why it matters
The storage allowance is unchanged, but the failure mode is materially harsher. A small project can treat old Vercel deployments as convenient rollback points, historical previews or reproducible snapshots without consciously using them as a backup system. On Hobby, crossing the shared account-level storage cap can now remove that history immediately. Builders using many preview deployments, large build outputs or several dormant projects therefore need to manage deployment storage proactively rather than relying on the old grace window.
The free plan keeps a much smaller protected history
Vercel now guarantees each Hobby project its three most recent production deployments plus its three most recent deployments of any type. The current production deployment, deployments with aliases and deployments associated with active branches remain protected. Preview deployments no longer have their own separate retention protection.
Crossing 10GB no longer buys a month to clean up
Hobby teams still receive 10GB of Deployment Storage shared across the team. Previously, deployments subject to cleanup could remain for 30 days after the account exceeded the limit. Vercel now says deployments outside the protected set are deleted immediately when the team is over 10GB. That turns storage housekeeping from a deferred problem into something that can affect deployment history as soon as the limit is crossed.
Rollback and preview URLs are the practical risk
Old deployments are useful even when they are not serving production traffic: they can provide rollback targets, reproduce an earlier build, preserve a feature preview or help diagnose when behaviour changed. The new Hobby policy means builders should not assume a long deployment list is durable history, particularly on accounts with frequent CI-driven previews.
Pro changes the economics rather than restoring the old Hobby rule
Vercel points teams that need more storage toward Pro, where Deployment Storage is usage-billed at $0.10 per GB per month. The decision is therefore partly operational and partly economic: prune unnecessary deployment output and previews, or pay for storage when historical deployments are valuable enough to retain.