Why are people paying so much for Vercel?

The snarky answer is that it's easier to be a full stack developer if your stack starts and ends with JavaScript. It's also the real answer - most webapps create value in the instant of views or clicks, so being charged solely on those metrics (even 200%) can make a certain amount of business sense, and if your business doesn't have need for redundant data stores or major backend services, you can get a lot of mileage out of a vercel based infrastructure.

I personally can't stand it, and actively work to excise it from front-end applications though _because_ it's difficult to work with it as a 'part' of your world. Like a lot of dev-experiential products/business models, their moat only exists if they can keep you "in" vercel, the moment they become just nodejs + lambda to a customer, then their value-add ceases; So they make it difficult to "grow up" out of vercel -- for many shops that's fine, it will be all they need from it, so a premium for a polished nodejs+lambda+deployment+cdn experience is worth it.

But if you're a micro-arch with backend services running on your own cloud, vercel will always be the wart in your infrastructure making everything from network policy to authentication and monitoring or tracing more difficult.

Sooooo we're an agency specialized in Next.js stuff.

We're essentially a bunch of passionate engineers but none of us care for ops work including myself, I really want to focus on the code, not on the deployments.

Vercel actually kind of saves us money because the apps we work on are mostly internal tools that don't have millions of requests per minute and developer time is expensive. If vercel saves us one hour of engineering work per month compared to aws it's already cheaper and it definitely saves more than one.

Sandwhich shop is just a layer on top of the Grocers, and they charge 100-200% more. So, why do people pay for it when they can use the Grocers directly?

As someone who does NOT know infra, I used to run things on Heroku, but since it's not improved in a decade while getting more expensive at the same time, and I had over a dozen personal projects there, I decided to move things out. It was also a good chance to get better at devops stuff!

The ROI so far from a "financial" point of view has been terrible, I've spent probably close to 40-60 hours just to set up things and it's still held by stitches. My apps go down from time to time, deploying takes 5x the time and each new website/app I try to migrate is 1~3h from beginning to end vs a few minutes it'd be in Heroku.

I started with DigitalOcean+Dokku, but I'm thinking about investing another 20~50h and learn Coolify, I have only heard amazing things on Twitter (my main concern is that it's "the new cool kid in the block" and maybe not as good as people make it seem).

Edit: the ROI of learning new things has been amazing though, I wish I had done this earlier.

Vercel has hired many key figures in the Javascript space such as Rich Harris and pays talking head Dev YouTubers willing to accept undisclosed sponsorships. That's why you'll see NextJS videos routinely get millions of views, and channels that solely shill NextJS.

If the site has no users and it's just you, it's like $20/mo.

If you have enough traffic that your bill is > $1,000, put some time into switching.

But I can have my entire site deployed with CI/CD on Github to Vercel in less than an hour. If I'm doing client work, my clients can go preview new work immediately. I can test and build deployments on different branches and send test builds to stakeholders. It's got a lot to like and it ends up saving you a lot of money.

What is right for just starting out is rarely right for scaling up. Too many people wasting too much time on AWS instead of shipping their app first.

For convenience. Depending on the size of your business, it is cheaper than paying an employee to maintain all that

I’ve found that a lot of developers would rather not have to think about where their application is going to run. This is a real shame, especially when there are free tools like SST that bridge the DevOps gap, making things like AWS and IAM less of a pain. Even better, there are complete self-hostable platform solutions like Supabase or the classic Docker Compose. However, the shared downside with these solutions is that they require some setup when it comes to deploying, unlike the magic of Vercel.

I do wonder when we started losing interest about where our code is actually being executed ?

As someone outside the ecosystem it is bananas to me. My only exposure to Vercel is endless crypto fake airdrop scams hosted on their free tier. They need to stop hosting their free tier on their main trademark (subdomain of vercel.app), or hire a real trust and safety team, because their brand is rock bottom for me after seeing it used for so many scams. If I see anything visibly hosted on Vercel I immediately assume it is a scam

Services like Vercel are the result of decades of ignorance/resistance against learning basic Linux Skills. Yes, they provide convenience but we have gone too far off in the other direction in the last decade or so. No one needs to host bare metal servers in their own basement but most people also don't need to use AWS let alone Vercel etc that are another wrapper/layer and charge excessively.

The balanced approach is to learn basics of Linux, get a decent VPS or even a dedicated server (rented) and setup the stack. Plenty of documentation everywhere. Just ensure that you have good backups running.

And no, most people don't need complex setup or expensive hosting. We just choose to do so because either it is the cool thing to do OR we don't know any better.

If people want to run Next.js for some reason, especially with react server components, then there is plenty of complexity that Vercel handles. For example, the version mismatch between the long-living client in the user's browser, and the server that is updated any time new changes are pushed. Vercel calls it the skew, and helps with it by keeping old servers alive for a while, and routing traffic to them from appropriately old clients. One would have to architect something similar on his own on AWS if he chose a similar tech stack.

As a www user who does not run Javascript, the only delay I experience when accessing web sites, if any, is connection and retrieval (download) of the page. There is no "loading". With the client I use, there is no auto-loading of resources. No images. No CSS.

The Vercel sites on 76.76.21.0/24 IP addresses seem faster to me than many other sites submitted to HN.

If a site is particularly fast to connect, I will sometimes check to see what CDN/hosting it is using. I have done this with several sites that turned out to be using Vercel.

AWS is just a layer on top of bare-metal, and charges similar markup. Businesses pay for convenience. Vercel is much more convenient than AWS, if your problem space fits inside Vercel. If you're (for example) a physical toy company and you just need some product marketing pages, Vercel seems like an amazing fit.

The fact I can just run `vercel` on many frontend projects, and it just works without having to think about iam, policies, service accounts, s3 configuration, cloudfront.

Time is money, and sure, once you reach some scale it will be efficient to move stuff to AWS, but for most projects it is not.

I just migrated our app from Vercel to AWS Amplify.

We’re updating everything to use SSO so we can do BeyondCorp-style auth on SaaS platforms. Vercel wanted to charge >$10k / year to get on their enterprise plan for SAML access, vs bill prior to that was ~$2.5k / year. The migration took ~30 mins and we expect our bill to drop to $500 / year. the toughest part was making sure we didn’t miss any build variables / secrets.

Is this as cheap as running base metal? No. But 30 mins to save $10k / year was worth it. And maybe the bigger point: what value are they really adding if it’s this easy to migrate off?

Would never consider the Vercel tax, we're hosting our new .NET Apps on Hetzner Could as that was the best value Hosting Provider we evaluated [1].

We can fit close to 40 .NET Docker Apps on a single 2vCPU/8GB RAM/20TB Bandwidth Server for €14.40/mo, which works out around $0.40/mo per .NET App. After a one-time setup to install Docker compose lets us deploy new .NET Apps by publishing to a new GitHub Repo and setting a few GitHub Action Variables.

Since we use SQLite and litestream.io for streaming replication to R2 we also avoid any expensive managed DB hosting costs.

We've also deployed a hono.dev/TypeScript/React/JSX Web App with Cloudflare Workers which at ~60k reqs/day fits within Cloudflare's 100k/day free quota so doesn't cost us anything yet. It's a pretty nice managed dev UX that I'd use again for any future (non .NET) Apps we want publicly accessible from the Internet.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream

Because the labour fee in effort is cheaper than the fee they charge ontop of AWS.

Developers dont want to be working on managing AWS infrastructure, they just want to push code up easily.

It's also easy to optimise that cost later and cut it down.

> (AWS) is just a layer on top of (bare metal servers), and they charge 100-200% more than what (random bare metal server provider) charges

The answer is the same: Convenience, SLAs, layers of abstraction…

It's surprising how many people seem to be happy to eat these kinds of charges just to avoid having to actually understand the infrastructure they run on.

Even AWS can be pretty expensive compared to other hosts, when most of the services are just amazon versions of readily available tools like Postgres or RabbitMQ that you could install on any cheap linux VPS and save a chunk of change. You just might have to learn a bit of linux sysadmin instead of stacking a teetering jenga tower of "abstraction".

It makes sense from a financial perspective for a small company that’s trying to grow. The most precious resource at such a company is engineering time. It’s very limited - you only have X number of engineers, it’s hard to hire good engineers, and they’ll only work so much. Engineers create the thing that makes money and they are in the critical path for nearly every single product experiment that a growing startup needs to perform to figure out its PMF. So nearly all of the small startup’s engineering time should be spent on things that differentiate its product, not stuff like serving frontend code, which is a solved problem. Traditional VC-funded startup economics assumes exponential growth after PMF, which means that engineering work required to reach PMF has potentially compounding returns.

Engineers know this too, which is why they choose Vercel over rolling their own infra. Frontend engineers get paid for building nice UXs that people will pay for, not mechanically implementing routing policies. So they’ll outsource that work to Vercel. It’s similar for backend engineers. What compounds this effect is that, at a small startup, you are on call in perpetuity. So you need to aggressively farm out support work for nonessential systems to service providers or else you risk being overwhelmed.

As programmers I think its hard to understand why others buy what we would sometimes build. But you all deeply underestimate yourselves! I'm also guilty of this as well. It is expensive to a business to do all those steps, to say nothing about the expertise to know what steps to take! For early-stage companies it makes sense to offload these tasks to tools, but as your company grows the cost-calculus shifts in favor of bringing the expertise in-house.

To take several numbers and examples from other threads, if you simply train on a technology for a week (40 hours) at $50/hour (@ $100,000 TC), that's $2000 for that week. Compare and contrast to some of the services ($1,200/year, $10K/year for SAML, etc) and you can begin to see the order(s) of magnitude difference between these "expensive" tools compared to a relatively "inexpensive" developer. From a business perspective, it can be a better ROI to have your developers work on products and buy the Operations.

because it's extremely convenient and low effort?

and very cheap at the low end?

I feel like you either don't understand AWS or Vercel at all if you think they're equivalent or interchangable.

Convenience and abstraction, it's a tradeoff between handling servers yourself and effectively outsourcing it. On top of this vercel also has some convenient tools for deploying websites.

You will likely find that it targets a similar audience as heroku et al.

Vercel did a great job on onboarding for more junior developers, and its a great place to start a project.

- Near instant Git deploys with links for each deployment

- Really easy to setup templates with "Deploy with Vercel" deeplinks

- Easy to setup web framework that works seamlessly with the platform

- All the add you need as your app grows (and yes, some you probably don't)

Once you're on its a pain to switch so its easy to stay on, so that's why so many people just continue.

If you liked Rails convention over configuration, you will likely appreciate Vercel. The only issue IMO is the full stack JS/TS approach. The JS ecosystem can be, let's just say, tough to navigate sometimes :)

in as much as I dislike or hate the "enterprise" frameworks like next etc. I think vercel brings value to teams that say are collaborating with design, product etc ... since you can immediately have hot deploy many versions of the same site at once etc ... without doing a lot of mechanics in terms of infrastructure. that's way cheaper than hiring an engineer.

but if you're in the stick to simple stuff - and not into the optimizing clicks business - deploying to cloudflare pages or just vps or cdn isn't much of a hustle.

Convenience and devops avoidance

The same reason I pay for AWS Lambda: I'd rather let someone else deal with it.

Until the costs outweigh the benefits, I'll keep using it.

VPS is just a layer on top of physically maintaining servers. That doesn't mean anything. People are paying for convenience.

Using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a much better experience over using cloud service providers like AWS. The amount of premium that one pays for using the former and whether it's justified is a separate discussion.

Also this should be an Ask HN.

premature optimization

Vercel works fine if you're starting out and have low volume apps.

Also depending on what's costing you most, i.e. CDN you could easily swap URLs around to use Cloudflare or some other alternative

so you could go a long way before considering moving :)

Why do people pay 100-200% to use Algolia

Ease of use, optimized performance for modern frontend frameworks, built-in CI/CD, global CDN

Have you used vercel before? It's a lot more than just a layer on AWS. They really understand specifically what Front end engineers need to be productive with their external stakeholders (ie: design, product, etc). I'm sure other products do this now but they were, as far as I know, the first to automatically deploy a version of your app by PR, for example.

Can you do this yourself? Yeah, obviously. But it's a build vs buy conversation and for a lot of people the value that this tooling gives you immediately is worth the buy.

Vercel free plan doesn't ask for bank details, AWS does :)

Their website with pricing plan crashes shortly after opening in Firefox with "Application error: a client-side exception". Yes a static website crashes in web browser on a PC in 2024. I guess this solves the problem entirely.

No one knows how to write code anymore, which is great news for those of us that do

Ok i get it ? so tell me what is right?

Because they took over the biggest JS framework and added ads everywhere in the docs. Vercel is trash.