Can I use Vercel for internal HTML sharing on the free tier?

No. Vercel's free (Hobby) tier does not include password protection or SSO. It hosts public content only.

What if I already have Vercel for our main product?

Keep using it. Use Display for artifact publishing alongside it. These aren't competing tools — Vercel deploys your application, Display publishes your internal documents and artifacts. Most teams use both.

Does Display do anything Vercel does for app deployment?

No. Display doesn't support build pipelines, edge functions, framework optimization, or continuous deployment from git. It does one thing: publishes HTML and Markdown files behind company auth. It's not a substitute for Vercel in application deployment.

What about Vercel password protection — isn't that cheaper?

Password protection ($150/month add-on) uses a shared password, not identity-based auth. Anyone who knows the password can view the content. There's no per-user audit trail. There's no domain restriction (a contractor with the password sees the same thing as an employee). For anything beyond "casual access restriction," shared passwords aren't sufficient.

Vercel SSO vs. Display: Which to Use for Internal HTML Sharing

The cost comparison

This is the number that ends most conversations. Look at it first.

Feature	Vercel	Display
Monthly price (100 viewers)	$320+	$49
SSO included	$300/mo add-on	✅ Included
File upload (no git project)	❌	✅
Publish CLI	❌	✅
MCP integration for Claude Desktop	❌	✅
Unlimited viewers	✅	✅
Google SSO	$300/mo add-on	✅ Included
Microsoft SSO	$300/mo add-on	✅ Included
Setup time	20–30 min	15 sec

Vercel Pro + SSO add-on: $20/seat base (5 seats minimum) + $300/month SSO add-on = $400+/month to share one project with company auth.

Display Teams: $49/month flat, unlimited viewers, Google and Microsoft SSO included.

What Vercel is actually for

Vercel is a deployment platform for web applications. It's excellent at what it was designed to do.

Continuous deployment from git repositories. Build pipelines for Next.js, Remix, SvelteKit, and other frameworks. Edge functions. Preview URLs for pull requests. Global CDN with edge caching. Framework-optimized builds.

This is Vercel's core value. If you're shipping a product — a web application with a build step, a git repo, and a deployment pipeline — Vercel is a strong choice.

What Vercel is not for

Publishing ad-hoc files.

You cannot upload an HTML file to Vercel. Vercel requires a git repository with a specific project structure. Every artifact you want to host needs its own repository or a dedicated folder within a shared repo — creating infrastructure overhead that doesn't fit "I have an HTML file and need my company to see it."

There is no vercel publish ./report.html command. The closest equivalent is committing the file to a git repo, creating a Vercel project, connecting the repo, and configuring deployment settings. That's 20–30 minutes of setup for a file that took 60 seconds to generate.

No MCP integration for non-technical users. No "publish this to my team" in Claude Desktop.

The Vercel SSO add-on: what you actually get

Vercel offers two auth products:

Password protection ($150/month add-on on Pro): A shared password on deployment previews. Not identity-aware — anyone who knows the password can view. No per-user audit trail. No domain restriction.

SAML SSO ($300/month add-on on Pro or Enterprise): Identity-aware SSO. This is real authentication — it's just that it costs $300/month per project at the Pro level.

For a company sharing many small artifacts — a Playwright report, an architecture diagram, a competitive analysis, a sprint summary — the model breaks. You'd need either one Vercel project per artifact (each a separate SSO instance) or one project with all artifacts as subdirectories. Both are engineering overhead for a publishing problem.

The $300/month SSO add-on is designed for teams deploying a single, persistent web application that happens to need access control. It's not designed for ad-hoc artifact publishing.

When to use Vercel anyway

You're deploying a web application, not sharing a file. A full Next.js app with a build pipeline, CI/CD, and an engineering team maintaining it — Vercel is the right tool.

You already have a git project structure and the HTML is a natural output of that project's build process. If your Playwright tests run in CI and output to /test-results, and that's already a git repo, a Vercel deployment of /test-results is reasonable.

You have SSO as part of a broader Vercel Enterprise contract. If your company is already on Vercel Enterprise and the cost is sunk, using Vercel's SSO for some internal content is pragmatic.

You need framework support, edge functions, or preview deployments as part of a real application — not for static HTML sharing.

When to use Display

You have an HTML file — from Claude Code, Cursor, a CI pipeline, a data export, or any other source — and you need your company to see it.

You don't want to create a git project. The file exists. You want a URL. That's it.

You want a CLI command. dsp publish ./report.html → URL. No project setup. No deployment configuration.

You want Google and Microsoft SSO at a flat rate. Not $300/month per project. $49/month for your entire company, all artifacts, unlimited viewers.

You want MCP for non-technical users. PMs and analysts can publish from Claude Desktop without a terminal.

The workflow comparison

Vercel (with SSO on a new project):

Create a git repository
Commit the HTML file
Go to vercel.com
Create a new project, connect the repository
Configure build settings (or disable build step for static files)
Add the $300/month SSO add-on
Configure your identity provider
Deploy
Get URL

Estimated time for first artifact: 20–30 minutes. Recurring cost: $320+/month.

Display:

dsp publish ./report.html

Time for first artifact after initial setup: 15 seconds. Recurring cost: $49/month.

Try Display free — 15-second publish, no git project required →