I run a small retail business and have three projects on a Pro team. This month my bill came to $445, of which $439.53 was Build CPU Minutes (87 days 5 hours of build CPU). My previous cycle’s on-demand spend was $0.

When I investigated, every project on my team was set to Turbo build machines (30 vCPUs, 60 GB). I never selected Turbo. It appears to have been the default. Combined with preview deployments building on every pull-request push, an ordinary month of development multiplied my bill many times over.

I’ve now set every project to Standard and limited builds to production only, and my budget alerts are set lower. The cost has stopped. But:

Defaulting paying customers to the most expensive build tier, without a clear prompt, isn’t a fair practice. Cost-heavy options should be opt-in, especially on metered billing. The refund route is closed. The support agent says the “automatic refund limit has been reached” and that it cannot open a case for a human to review it, so there is no route to a person for a charge caused by a platform default.

I’d like to ask Vercel to:

make Standard (or a clearly-priced choice) the default for build machines on Pro, and show the cost difference when Turbo is selected; warn when build spend suddenly rises against the previous cycle; give customers affected by the Turbo default a route to a human billing review.

Has anyone else been hit by this? If anyone from Vercel’s billing team sees this, I’d appreciate a review of my charges.