Speed Insights adds a free tier

Speed Insights now has a free tier that gives you a high-level performance overview from your real users. The paid product, now called Speed Insights Plus, includes deeper diagnostics and historical data. If you were already paying for Speed Insights, only the name has changed, your capabilities and pricing stay the same.
The free tier is available on every plan, for any number of projects. It includes 10,000 events per team every 30 days. Previously, free Speed Insights was limited to a single project on Hobby, and upgrading to Pro meant losing it unless you paid for the add-on. Now your free tier carries over, and you only pay if you upgrade to Speed Insights Plus.
Speed Insights reports how real visitors experience your pages, using live traffic rather than lab conditions. Speed Insights Plus adds slow-route diagnosis and detailed breakdowns for finding where pages get slow, and historical data to track performance over time. It also provides access to Drains and the Vercel CLI for working with performance data outside the dashboard.
Install @vercel/speed-insights in your project to start reporting real-user data, or open the Speed Insights dashboard to view your results.
Learn more about Speed Insights.

Facts Only

* Speed Insights has a free tier offering a high-level performance overview from real users.
* The paid product is named Speed Insights Plus and includes deeper diagnostics and historical data.
* Free tier access includes 10,000 events per team every 30 days.
* Previously, free Speed Insights was limited to a single project on Hobby plans.
* Upgrading to Pro meant losing the free tier unless an add-on was purchased previously.
* The free tier now carries over for any number of projects.
* Speed Insights reports visitor experiences using live traffic data.
* Speed Insights Plus adds slow-route diagnosis and historical performance tracking.
* Speed Insights Plus also provides access to Drains and the Vercel CLI.
* Users can install @vercel/speed-insights or view a dashboard for results.

Executive Summary

Speed Insights offers a free tier providing a high-level performance overview using real user data. The paid tier, Speed Insights Plus, provides additional features such as deeper diagnostics, historical data, slow-route diagnosis, and detailed breakdowns of page performance. Users who already possess the basic Speed Insights access do not see changes in capabilities or pricing. The free tier includes 10,000 events per team over a 30-day period. Previously, free access was limited to a single project on Hobby plans, and upgrading to Pro entailed losing this access unless an add-on was purchased. The current structure allows the free tier to carry over across any number of projects without requiring an upgrade unless Speed Insights Plus is chosen. The service utilizes live traffic for performance reporting rather than lab conditions.

Full Take

The evolution of the Speed Insights offering demonstrates a strategic shift from restrictive tiered access toward a usage-based model, recontextualizing the free tier as a baseline utility rather than a gatekeeper to advanced features. The core tension lies in how feature segmentation affects user onboarding and perceived value. By making the free tier universally available across any project count while maintaining a specific event limit, the platform establishes a clear boundary between basic awareness (free) and actionable diagnosis (paid). The historical context shows an earlier structure where gaining higher-level access required specific payment decisions that could lead to feature loss; the current structure minimizes this friction by making baseline reporting accessible universally. This pattern suggests a focus on capturing broad adoption while monetizing deeper, retrospective, or diagnostic capabilities. The implication is that performance data itself is valuable enough to be distributed freely, but the deeper forensic tools—historical tracking and slow-route analysis—are positioned as necessary investments for advanced operational insight. The missing context is whether this new structure genuinely promotes user agency or merely optimizes revenue capture within an established service paradigm.