On 16 September 2026, Vercel changed how long free Hobby projects keep old deployments. Each Hobby project now retains its 3 most recent production deployments plus its 3 most recent deployments of any type, and preview deployments no longer get their own protection. In April, the protected number for production was 10. If you launched on Vercel's free tier — and a lot of indie products do — your safety net for bad deploys just got much shorter.
What changed, exactly
Vercel's changelog lays out the new rules for Hobby projects:
Always kept: your current production deployment, aliased deployments, and active-branch deployments. These are still never deleted.
Also kept, regardless of age: the 3 most recent production deployments and the 3 most recent deployments of any type.
Everything else is eligible for removal — and here is the sharper part: when a Hobby team goes over its 10GB deployment storage allowance, deployments outside those exceptions are now deleted immediately rather than after 30 days. Going over the limit can also block new deployments until space is freed.
For context, the previous change on 27 April 2026 capped Hobby retention at 30 days while always preserving the 10 most recent production deployments and any aliased ones. So in under five months Hobby has gone from "30 days, with ten production deployments protected" to "three protected, and instant deletion over 10GB". Pro and Enterprise were not affected by the April change, and the September changelog points Hobby users who need more to Pro, where deployment storage is billed at $0.10 per GB per month.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Old deployments are not just clutter. On Vercel, a previous deployment is the thing you roll back to. When a release breaks checkout at 11pm, promoting yesterday's deployment is the fastest fix available — but only if yesterday's deployment still exists.
With three protected production deployments, a team that ships several times a day can lose its last known-good build within a morning. A bad deploy you do not notice until after two follow-up fixes may leave you with no clean build to go back to. You can still redeploy from an older git commit, but that means a fresh build, which is slower and not guaranteed to reproduce the old output if dependencies or environment variables have moved.
The preview change matters for a different reason. If you share preview URLs with clients, testers or investors, those links can now disappear as soon as newer deployments push them out of the "3 most recent of any type" window, unless they are aliased or on an active branch.
Who this does not touch
The September change is scoped to Hobby projects. Teams on Pro or Enterprise keep their existing retention settings and pay for deployment storage rather than hitting a hard 10GB ceiling. And nothing changes for your live site itself: the current production deployment is protected on every plan, so this is about your history and your rollback options, not about your product going offline.
What to do about it
Know what is protected before you need it. Aliased deployments are always kept. If you have a release you consider known-good, give it an alias so it survives.
Keep an eye on the 10GB line. Immediate deletion only kicks in above the limit. Large build outputs, bundled assets and many projects on one team all add up. Vercel's retention docs explain how to see and reduce storage use.
Make your rollback path independent of Vercel's retention. Tag releases in git, keep builds reproducible with locked dependencies, and make sure you can redeploy a tagged commit quickly. That is good practice on any plan.
Do not share raw preview URLs for anything that needs to last. Use an alias or a dedicated branch.
Treat this as a signal for when to move to Pro. Vercel's fair use guidelines already restrict Hobby to non-commercial personal use, and count taking payments or advertising a product as commercial, so if you have paying customers you should already be on Pro. If you are, none of this applies. If you are not, this is a reasonable nudge.
The bottom line
Since 16 September, Vercel Hobby projects keep only three recent production deployments and three of any type, and anything unprotected is deleted immediately once you exceed 10GB. That shrinks your instant-rollback window considerably. Alias your known-good releases, keep your builds reproducible from git tags, and if the product is earning money, move it to Pro.