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.

+1

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.

Hi @anshumanb ,

Thank you for the clarification.

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:

1. Do we need to create a Team first in order to transfer the project to another account?

2. Does this mean we must upgrade to a Pro plan at least once to enable the transfer?

3. 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.

Thank you.

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.

Let me know if you need more help.

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 just fixed it by going to https://vercel.com/account/settings/authentication and reconnecting my github

i can confirm, this is the solution. Thanks !

Thank you, that helped.

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.

Thanks, that worked. This happened when I switched my GitHub email to a private username@users.noreply in 2025, but the bug appeared in 2026.

thanks a ton! this is the right solution (and I apparently didn’t even have git connected at all under auth in that page, only the git integration separately). Guess this was a breaking change from vercel side some point between last september and now.

Same issue – I’m the only person working and and has ever worked on my project. Getting the same error message. My github and my local emails are the exact same I triple checked. I also tried re-connecting my github account and no luck

Please help! No idea what to check next

Same exact issue. Just randomly stopped deploying from my personal Github on hobby plan.

No change in Github ownership, no change in account ownership, just prompting me to “Upgrade to pro” because otherwise I can’t collaborate.

As far as I understand, something changed recently so a GitHub connection can only be linked to one account at a time. I used to have the same GitHub connected to both my work account and my personal account, but that doesn’t seem to be possible anymore. Now I have to switch the connection each time I want to deploy a different project. Hopefully, Vercel will address this soon.

Thanks bro. appreciate the solution

This is also impacting deployments via Vercel CLI using Access Tokens (not connecting Git directly)

The workaround I found is to override the commit email author in the CI before running Vercel CLI deployment

It was working fine for 6+ months and started failing today, very disappointing!

Example:

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  - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
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  - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
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    with:
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      node-version: 24
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      cache: pnpm
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  - run: pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
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  - name: Override HEAD author for Vercel author protection
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    run: |
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      git config user.email "_VERCEL_HOBBY_ACCOUNT_OWNER_@_EMAIL_"
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      git config user.name "_SOME_NAME_"
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      git commit --amend --no-edit --author="_SOME_NAME_ <_VERCEL_HOBBY_ACCOUNT_OWNER_@_EMAIL_>"
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  - run: pnpm exec vercel pull --yes --environment=production --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
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  - run: pnpm exec vercel build --prod --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
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  - run: pnpm exec vercel deploy --prebuilt --prod --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}