How to pause a Vercel project

If money is on fire right now: method 1. Read the rest afterwards.

1. Pause the project (dashboard)#

Project → Settings → General → scroll to the pause control.

Stops the project serving traffic and stops it building. Fully reversible from the same screen. This is the correct answer in almost every case.

What it takes down: that project only. Other projects on the team keep running.

2. The API#

The same operation, scriptable — which matters if you want it bound to a shortcut or an alert rather than a browser tab.

curl -X POST "https://api.vercel.com/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/pause" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VERCEL_TOKEN"

This is what MONII's kill switch calls. There is no magic in it — the value is having it one swipe away on a phone rather than needing a laptop and a token.

3. Delete the offending deployment#

Blunter, and occasionally the right blunt instrument: if a single bad deployment is the cause, removing it stops that specific thing immediately.

Caveat: less reversible than pausing. You are removing an artefact, not flipping a switch. If the runaway behaviour is in your current production build, promoting the previous good deploy is usually the better move — see rollback.

4. Firewall rule instead of pausing#

Often the better answer, and almost always the one people forget in a panic.

If the cost is coming from identifiable traffic — a crawler, a scraper, one abusive IP range — a WAF rule or rate limit stops the spend without taking your site off the internet.

Vercel's firewall supports blocking by IP, ASN, user agent, path and rate. If the usage graph points at one obvious source, block it and leave the site up. Your users never notice.

Use this when the traffic is identifiable. Use pausing when it is not, or when you do not yet know.

5. Spend Management auto-pause#

Vercel can pause automatically when you hit a spend amount. It is the only method here that works while you are asleep, which makes it the most valuable one — and it carries a set of caveats worth understanding first:

• Pro and above only. Hobby gets nothing.
• The pause switch is separate and off by default. Setting an amount alone does nothing but notify.
• It pauses every project on the team, each needing manual unpausing.
• It checks every few minutes, so it fires slightly late.

Turn it on anyway. Late and broad beats absent.

What pausing does not do#

• It does not refund. Charges already incurred stay incurred.
• It does not cover fixed costs. Seats, Marketplace integrations and add-ons bill monthly regardless.
• It is not instant at the meter. Usage in flight still bills.

Netlify, briefly#

Netlify has no equivalent pause. The nearest thing is setting a site password, which makes the site inaccessible and stops the traffic — which is what MONII's Netlify kill switch does. See Netlify has no kill switch.

Questions people actually ask