Costs
What it costs
Nothing, to us. There is no paid tier, no hosted plan, no account and nothing to cancel. What you pay is whatever your hosting and your domain cost — and everything below is the real number with the catch attached.
Hosting
Hosting
| Where | Cost | The catch | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Hobby + free Neon | $0/month | Non-commercial personal use only. Read the clause below before you use it for anything you are paid for. | Verified · 12 August 2026 |
| Netlify free | $0/month | A 300-credit plan. What one credit buys is not published and the credits documentation URL 404s, so we cannot tell you where the ceiling is. | Unverified · 12 August 2026 |
| Supabase free | $0/month | Projects pause after about a week of low activity, with a year to restore. A portfolio nobody visits for a week is that profile exactly. | Verified · 12 August 2026 |
| A machine you already own | Electricity | You maintain it: updates, backups, a certificate. Small, and not nothing. | — |
| A small VPS | A few pounds a month | Same as above. We have not price-checked providers; compare them yourself. | — |
A domain is roughly £10–15 a year from any registrar. We do not sell domains, we take no cut, and we have not price-checked registrars.
Vercel
Before you use Vercel’s free plan
This is the one thing on this site we would most regret leaving out. Our own recommended deployment is Vercel, and their definition of commercial use is broader than most people expect.
Vercel’s Hobby plan is "restricted to non-commercial personal use only", and their definition of commercial usage includes "advertising the sale of a product or service" and asking for donations.
A portfolio that exists to get you hired, or that lists services you charge for, may well fall inside that. A student’s coursework portfolio almost certainly does not. We are not going to tell you which side of the line your site is on — that is Vercel’s call, not ours, and their page says to ask their support team if you are unsure.
What we will say plainly: if your portfolio advertises work you are paid for, budget for Vercel Pro or use one of the other options. Running it on your own server carries no such restriction, and neither does any host you pay for in the ordinary way.
We have not checked whether Netlify’s free tier carries an equivalent clause, so do not read its presence in the table above as an endorsement of it for commercial sites.
Permanence
What happens if this project stops
Nothing happens to your site. It is running on your infrastructure, from a copy of the code you already have, against a database you control. No licence server checks in, nothing phones home, and there is no key that expires.
The licence cannot be withdrawn from what is already released. MIT is irrevocable for a version already published. Fork it, change it, sell what you build with it — that permission is already given and cannot be taken back.
What nobody can honestly promise is the licence on a future version. Projects have relicensed before and some of them said they never would. What actually protects you is not a pledge; it is that you can keep and fork the version you have, and that your content is in a database you own in a format you can read.
There is no company here to be acquired. One person, no investors, no hosted service and no revenue — which removes the usual reason a project changes its terms, and is also the honest risk: a project with one maintainer can simply stop. That is why the export button and the licence matter more than any roadmap.
Sustain
How this is paid for
It is not. There is no funding, no sponsorship, no paid tier and nothing planned. It is one person’s project and it costs a domain to run.
That is worth saying because “free forever” from a company usually means a paid tier is coming. Here there is no company, so the honest statement is narrower and more useful: nothing about the software is gated today, and if that ever changed you would still have the version you already had, under a licence that does not expire.
CTA
Try it before any of this matters
Open Portfolio is free, and the demo needs no account and no host.