What changed
On September 9, 2026, Vercel made Vercel Authentication for production deployments available at no additional cost on every plan. Previously, protecting production domains through this path required the $150-per-month Advanced Deployment Protection add-on. Vercel Authentication requires visitors to sign in with a Vercel account that has project access. Deployment Protection Exceptions are also now free on every plan. Separately, Pro teams can buy Password Protection for individual projects at $20 per protected project per month rather than purchasing protection for the whole team.
Why it matters
Access control around production deployments is often treated as a security requirement rather than an optional convenience, especially for internal tools, private dashboards and sites that are deployed to production infrastructure before public launch. Moving Vercel Authentication from a $150/month add-on to free changes the economics for small teams that previously had to choose between paying enterprise-like protection costs, building their own authentication layer or keeping production deployments publicly reachable. The new per-project password price also makes paid protection more granular for Pro teams.
Production authentication moves out of the $150 add-on
Vercel Authentication can now cover all deployments in a project, including production, at no additional cost. Vercel says the previous production-domain path required Advanced Deployment Protection at $150 per month.
The free control is identity-based, not a shared password
Vercel Authentication requires visitors to sign in with a Vercel account and have access to the project. That makes it well suited to team-only tools and private deployments but is different from sharing a simple password with external users.
Protection exceptions are now free too
Teams can keep a project protected while making specific preview domains public through Deployment Protection Exceptions without paying for the old add-on.
Password Protection becomes project-scoped on Pro
Pro teams can now add Password Protection for $20 per protected project per month instead of purchasing a team-wide protection add-on. That lowers cost for teams that need password access on only one or two projects.
The pricing change can replace custom access-control work
For small teams using Vercel as the deployment layer for internal apps or pre-launch products, platform-level protection can remove the need to add temporary application authentication purely to keep a production URL private.