Netlify is an excellent choice for a web app, and it has quietly become the place AI-built sites go live: Bolt, Lovable and ChatGPT-built sites publish there.
Kudos where it's due: like Vercel, its key value is one workflow. Push to GitHub and every pull request gets a preview URL with its own Postgres branch (Netlify Database is built on Neon), merging ships it, and rollback is one click, all from one dashboard. My stack has no such thing: I wire previews, rollbacks and environments together with Pulumi and GitHub Actions, and that takes real engineering. I'm comfortable with that. If you aren't technical, that one workflow is the point, and you should pick Netlify or Vercel over a complicated AWS setup.
It also does things for teams with no terminal: Agent Runners run Claude Code, Codex or Gemini in the cloud from a prompt or a Linear issue and hand back a preview link, and one team price covers everyone.
I skip it for the same reason as Vercel: my clients are enterprises, and their work is mostly in the backend, well beyond what a web platform covers. And doing it all yourself is still cheaper, if you do it well. Not if you do it like an idiot.
Use it when
- A non-technical team building with AI tools: Bolt and Lovable already publish to Netlify.
- You want Claude Code, Codex or Gemini running in the cloud from a prompt or a Linear issue, with each result as a preview link (Agent Runners).
- Many collaborators (founders, designers, marketers): one team price, not per seat.
- A preview URL for every pull request, each with its own database branch, and one-click rollback, from day one.
- Forms on a static site with no backend to write.
Don't use it when
- Most of the work is in the backend: event-driven pipelines, queues, jobs that run for hours, data lakes, IoT.
- Enterprise AWS requirements: multiple accounts, IAM, VPCs, or data that must stay inside AWS in Sydney.
- Next.js with server rendering that must track every new feature on day one: Vercel does that better.
- Costs you need to forecast: credits are hard to predict, and agents that deploy to production often spend them fast.
Pricing
Pro $20 a month for the whole team, with unlimited members and 3,000 credits. Production deploys, bandwidth, compute and AI usage all draw on credits.
Provisioning
Pulumi via a Terraform provider · Official Terraform provider
Netlify's own Terraform provider covers sites, environment variables and DNS. From Pulumi, use it through pulumi package add terraform-provider.
Use instead
Cloudflare static hosting for the front end, Lambda or Cloudflare Workers for the API, Neon for the data, all provisioned with Pulumi.
Alternatives
- Vercel Next.js with server rendering, or AI products that need a sandbox or durable workflows.
- Cloudflare static hosting Static sites, SPAs and PWAs: free and unlimited.
- AWS Lambda The API and everything event-driven behind it.
Sources
Last reviewed by Nicolas Dao