Hello,
I am experiencing a deployment issue on my Vercel project.
The deployment is being blocked with the following message:
The Deployment was blocked because the commit author does not have contributing access to the project on Vercel. Hobby teams do not support collaboration.
Project Details
The project is currently on the Hobby plan.
There is only one member in the team (the project owner).
The repository is connected to GitHub.
The commit author is different from the Vercel account owner.
I can see previous commits from other contributors (zerosoft…) that appear to have deployed successfully.
I would appreciate clarification on the following:
Was this project previously on a Pro plan?
Is there any way to allow deployments from a different GitHub commit author without upgrading?
Is merging a Pull Request from the project owner the only supported workaround under the Hobby plan?
Do we need to create or use a GitHub account with the same email address as the Vercel account to allow deployments on the Hobby plan?
Hi @axpdhired2026, the Hobby teams do not support collaboration and such the error is expected behavior - Hobby plans only allow deployments from the account owner. As you can see on our pricing, the Hobby plan only comes with 1 Developer seat.
The zerosoft... user must have been the owner of the team when the deployment was done previously.
Your options:
Upgrade to Pro: This enables collaboration and allows multiple contributors to deploy
Transfer ownership: Move the project to the primary developer’s Vercel account if they’ll be doing most deployments
Note: Simply matching email addresses between GitHub and Vercel won’t bypass this restriction - the GitHub account must be connected to the Vercel account that owns the project.
This started happening to me today too. I did not change ownership of my Vercel project, nor did I change anything about the way I was committing to my github repo.
I switched the git email to match the Vercel project owner, but I’m still having the same problem.
On github, I have the Vercel app/integration installed and connected to the correct account.
Following your suggestion, I created a new Vercel account and connected it with the GitHub account that is pushing the commits.
Now I would like to transfer the existing project from the old Vercel account to this new account. However, when I try to use the Transfer Project option, I’m not able to find the new account as a destination — I only see an option to create a Team.
Could you please clarify a few things:
Do we need to create a Team first in order to transfer the project to another account?
Does this mean we must upgrade to a Pro plan at least once to enable the transfer?
If we start the Pro trial, will that allow us to complete the transfer and then downgrade later?
Just want to make sure we follow the correct process before making any changes.
Hi @axpdhired2026, to transfer project you must be part of both the teams: sender and receiver. Since, you are on the Hobby plan for both, you can’t do this.
I would say the simplest approach would be to deploy the project in the new team, add all the environment variables, and just remove the domains and project from the older team.
Hi, this is happen to me right now. I just committing like before and suddenly it was blocked. The reason was “The Deployment was blocked because the commit author does not have contributing access to the project on Vercel”. No one has access to my vercel and the only one who deployed in the project was me. No one else. Please help.
Hi @anshumanb I have exactly the same problem but on the Pro plan. I get the error: The Deployment was blocked because the commit author does not have contributing access to the project on Vercel. And when I click on Invite user, as well as Invite Team Member, it offers me invite the email to which the Vercel Pro account is registered. How do I solve this? Everything was working fine for me until now and yesterday this error appeared for the first time.
Thank you.
I am on the pro plan. My Team don’t use the deployment interface they just commit. If i don’t make a commit above theirs, they are the most recent author. As a result, if i don’t to do a dummy commit on top of it I then have to add them to the account and pay another $20/m. This is probably the dumbest, most extractive limitation. I might have to stay with Railway (even with their outtages) given this detail wow.
