HACKER Q&A
📣 pytorch

At what point does a solo dev migrate from Vercel/Next.js to a VPS?


I’m a solo founder running a two-sided marketplace app on the typical Vercel free tier + Supabase stack. It’s live with low-traffic right now. My concern is the 'cliff' I keep reading about—where Vercel becomes prohibitively expensive at scale. For those who migrated to a $5 Hetzner/DigitalOcean VPS:

What was the specific metric that forced the move? (Bandwidth, Function execution time, Cost?)

How much 'DevOps' time do you actually spend maintaining the VPS vs. building product?

I want to avoid premature optimization, but also don't want to be locked into a platform that will bankrupt the project if it takes off.

  👤 BoredPositron Accepted Answer ✓
When you have the necessary skills to do so.
👤 pamcake
There is a middle ground of running it on a Heroku-style PaaS hosting for example Docker containers. No Next.js. Don't go for the complexity of kubernetes unless you really know you want it or need it.

This way you get away from the vendor lock-in. You should be able to migrate providers in the future without too much work and have a clear path towards hosting on a VPS or your own servers when you get enough traffic to warrant it.

Effective cost should probably fall somewhere in the middle, too.

But you won't have to deal with most of the ops headache that comes with the VPS approach: OS updates, firewalls, filesystems, startup orchestration, log fike rotation, etc.