What happened

Vercel made Speed Insights free on every plan, including Pro and Enterprise, for any number of projects. Speed Insights measures how your site actually performs for real visitors, not in a lab test. It shows whether pages are genuinely loading slowly for the people using them.

Before this change, the free version only worked on one project, and only if that project stayed on the free Hobby plan. The moment you upgraded to a paid Pro plan to host a real app, you lost that free monitoring. You had to pay extra for it as an add-on.

The paid version now has its own name, Speed Insights Plus. It adds slow-route diagnosis and deeper historical data. It also adds Drains, an automatic pipe that streams your performance data somewhere outside Vercel’s dashboard, like your own logging tool. If you were already paying for the old add-on, Vercel says only the name changed. Your price and features stay the same.

Why it matters

The catch is in how the new free tier is measured. It’s not 10,000 free events per project. It’s 10,000 events for your entire team, shared across every project that team runs, reset every 30 days.

An “event” here means roughly one visitor’s page load being recorded and scored. If you’re running one small side project, 10,000 recorded page loads a month is plenty. If your team has five apps live on the same Vercel team, all five are drawing from that same 10,000-event pool. A team account can burn through the shared cap in a fraction of the time a single project would.

Vercel’s announcement doesn’t say what happens once a team goes over that limit inside the 30-day window. It doesn’t say whether recording pauses or older data gets dropped. Treat 10,000 as a hard budget to watch, not a soft buffer.

Who should care

This matters if you deploy live apps on Vercel and want to know how fast they actually load for real visitors. It matters even more if your team runs more than one project on the same Vercel team. That’s exactly the setup where the shared 10,000-event pool runs out faster than you’d expect.

It matters less if you’re still building and haven’t deployed to real users yet. Speed Insights measures live traffic, so there’s nothing to see until people are actually visiting your pages.

What builders should do next

If you haven’t set up Speed Insights yet, it now costs nothing to try regardless of your plan or project count. Install it with:

npm install @vercel/speed-insights

That package is what records each visitor’s page-load performance and sends it to your dashboard. Vercel’s Speed Insights documentation covers the couple of lines you add to your app to turn it on.

If you already run more than one project under the same Vercel team, check your current usage before assuming you’re covered. Open your team’s Speed Insights dashboard and look at how many events your busiest project alone generates in a normal month. If that one project is already close to 10,000, adding a second or third project on the same team will likely blow through the shared limit before the 30 days are up. At that point your options are watching usage closely, turning monitoring off on lower-priority projects, or paying for Speed Insights Plus.

End of article