What happened
Vercel changed how long it keeps old deployments on its free Hobby plan. The company announced Deployment Retention for Hobby teams now deletes old deployments sooner on September 16.
A deployment is a live, working copy of your app that Vercel builds and hosts every time you push code or make a change. Vercel keeps old deployments around so you can roll back to one if a new version breaks something. Hobby accounts get 10GB of storage for all of that saved history, called Deployment Storage.
Each Hobby project now keeps only its 3 most recent production deployments (the live version your visitors see), plus its 3 most recent deployments of any type, no matter how old they are. Everything else becomes eligible for deletion. Preview deployments, the working copies Vercel builds while you’re testing changes on a branch (a separate line of edits not yet merged into your live app) before those changes go live, no longer get their own separate protection.
If your team is already over the 10GB limit, deployments outside those few exceptions now get deleted right away instead of waiting the usual 30 days.
Why it matters
The part worth catching is what changed for preview deployments specifically. Before this update, a preview build tied to an old branch could still stick around under the general retention window. Now that protection is gone unless the deployment falls into one of the surviving exceptions.
Your current production deployment is still never deleted. Deployments with a custom alias (a specific web address you’ve pointed at that deployment, separate from its default Vercel URL), or ones tied to a branch that’s still open, are also still protected. But a preview link you shared with a client or teammate weeks ago, for a branch that’s since been merged or closed, has lost the safety net it had before.
This mostly bites side projects and abandoned experiments, the kind of Hobby account that racks up months of preview builds without anyone deleting them. If that project is anywhere near the 10GB cap, old links can start disappearing without a specific warning tied to that link.
There is a recovery window. Vercel’s deployment retention docs confirm that a deleted deployment can be restored for 30 days after deletion, as long as it built successfully. After that, it’s gone for good.
Who should care
This matters if you’re running one or more apps on Vercel’s free Hobby plan and you’ve deployed enough over time that you’re not sure how close you are to 10GB. It matters even more if you routinely share preview links for review, since those are exactly the deployments that lost protection.
It matters less if you’re on Pro or Enterprise, where the retention windows are longer by default, or if you’re a Hobby user with a single small project that rarely accumulates old builds.
What builders should do next
Check your current usage before assuming you’re fine. Open your team’s Usage page in the Vercel dashboard, then select Deployment Storage, to see your total and which project is using the most of it.
If you’re close to or over 10GB and you rely on a specific old preview link, don’t wait for it to disappear. Vercel’s docs describe protecting anything that matters with a custom alias, or noting which production deployments you need before older ones drop out of the “3 most recent” window.
If a deployment does vanish that you needed, go to that project’s Settings, then Security, then Recently Deleted, within 30 days. That’s where Vercel lets you restore it. Past that window, the only way to get that exact build back is to redeploy the same commit (the saved snapshot of your code at that point), and any preview URL tied to the deleted deployment will change.
If storage keeps climbing even after checking, the paid option is Vercel Pro, where storage is billed at $0.10 per GB per month. For a free side project, the faster fix is deleting deployments you don’t need instead of paying to keep everything.
End of article