Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2]<p>Fool me once...<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20181107092845&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;now#future-proof" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20181107092845&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;n...</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20181107092845&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;now#why-not-aws-lambda-azure-google-cloud-functions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20181107092845&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;n...</a>

I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I&#x27;ve been using sometime as my &#x27;heroku&#x27; for static sites? With that I&#x27;m also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp&#x2F;jekyll&#x2F;etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the exception of forms.<p>If this is just another choice that&#x27;s good. Perhaps it&#x27;s faster? I&#x27;ve deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but not much different than netlify&#x27;s build that works with a git push. Either way, congrats on the funding!<p>Disclaimer: I don&#x27;t work for netlify, though I did interview with them awhile back.

Vercel CEO here. We are incredibly delighted to bring the new brand to the world and share the news of our funding.<p>For everyone who&#x27;s been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!

&quot;Jamstack&quot; has to be the worst name for an architecture ever. &quot;Javascript&quot;, &quot;APIs&quot;, and &quot;markup&quot;... uhhh you mean like what the entire web already runs on?

I&#x27;m a huge fan of Zeit&#x2F;Vercel&#x27;s products and design. I&#x27;ve interacted with their team on a few occasions and they&#x27;ve always been nice. Plus, their mechanical keyboard is super cool... [0]<p>I absolutely loved the name &quot;Zeit&quot;, although I&#x27;ve read in this thread that it could have branding&#x2F;SEO issues. I&#x27;m hoping Vercel will grow on me – right now, it sounds like a combination of &quot;incel&quot;, &quot;Verizon&quot;, and maybe some kind of geriatric medicine.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;keyboard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;keyboard</a>

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it.<p>Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.”<p>Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.

I had a ton of trouble getting a simple gatsby.js website running on Zeit. Kept getting useless error messages that were impossible to debug.<p>Tried Netlify and it worked without any changes to my code. The Zeit UI might be slicker, but it definitely isn&#x27;t easier to use imo.

I always found the name incredible confusing since there is a major German newspaper called ZEIT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zeit.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zeit.de&#x2F;</a><p>I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.

Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known everywhere. And given their products have simple and non googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit so it&#x27;s googleable.<p>Good to see free personal plan tho.

Does anyone not directly involved in this kind of tech struggle to understand &#x27;what on earth it does&#x27;? I understand vaguely from the marketing copy, but it&#x27;s still pretty fuzzy.<p>Here is their front page copy:<p>&quot;Develop. Preview. Ship. Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams. All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN.&quot;<p>This doesn&#x27;t really say a whole lot.<p>Then we have these little bits:<p>&quot;Zero config Works out of the box with any web framework.&quot;<p>Great, but what is it, and what does it do?<p>&quot;instant static deploys Push to Git and your website is live. Zero configuration required.&quot;<p>So this is starting to make some sense - does this mean this technology will grab my github changes to push specific files to where I&#x27;ve hosted them? They ask me to &#x27;import a project&#x27; and yet I have idea what that means.<p>Here is the &#x27;intro&#x27; in docs: [1]<p>&quot;Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration.&quot;<p>That explains next to nothing.<p>Terminology like &#x27;Jamstack&#x27; is still very new and niche, I suggest outside of certain bubbles, very few people understand what that means, so the site is using language that is foreign to most readers. This is not going to work very well.<p>...<p>It would be nice to think I&#x27;m a little slow, but I don&#x27;t think I am - I think a large portion of today&#x27;s marketing and communications is a little rubbish: it fails to explain within any reasonable detail &#x27;what it is, what it does, why I would want it&#x27; and provide ultra-basic &#x27;hello world&#x27; examples that explain the nature of the system.<p>This is a problem.<p>There are new techs released every day, I&#x27;m tired of struggling through weird non-explanations of various platforms just to get the basic idea of even what it does, this is something companies should focus on.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;docs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;docs</a>

Congrats on the funding, but I&#x27;d like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in.<p>This is a big backing for Next.<p>However rebranding to Vercel is bad.

I&#x27;ve been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce.<p>Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.

I really liked the zeit brand. Vercel not so much. I hope that the name grows on me, either way I dont care as long as the tech is great.

Have anyone used both <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redwoodjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redwoodjs.com</a> and Nextjs and share their experience?

Awesome. I normally work on just web apps but had to build a website recently that had some complex bits in some pages but mainly a marketing site. The experience with nextjs and deploying with zeit was brilliant. Docs are good, everything works well, just an all round good experience. Please don&#x27;t break it!

A shame they changed the name, I liked &quot;Zeit&quot;. The re-branding reminds me of the browser IDE &quot;Hyperdev&quot; which changed to &quot;Gomix&quot; and finally to &quot;Glitch&quot;... Everytime the name changes, people care less... but I&#x27;m no businessman<p>&gt; [1] <i>...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution</i><p>Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;simpler-pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;simpler-pricing</a>

I’m surprised to see so many people nagging about the brand. As one user pointed out, there’s a big newspaper brand with that name already. And otherwise, who cares, really? Same company. It’s not a soccer team.

“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.”<p>Is this satire? Can’t tell.

one of our clients uses netlify, does anyone have experience with the two platforms and how they compare on price at the enterprise levels?

glad you renamed it. The Zeit i know, was able to serve Docker images

Looks like React&#x27;s originators (Jordan Walk and Pete Hunt) are funders.

Congrats Guillermo and team!

Great to see this company growing :)

I liked Zeit but had to switch because there was no way to get IP addresses to whitelist, so Vercel customers are likely to get hacked, because they’re forced to secure their database with only a password, and no firewall. Apparently you can fix this with an “enterprise” subscription, which is a huge red flag. Open source doesn’t get secure data? Vercel is likely to get hit with huge lawsuits over that, and I’m staying well clear until it’s fixed

Might the name change come from one of lead investors named &#x27;Accel&#x27;, who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own brand? Vercel&#x2F;Accel? I honestly don&#x27;t understand why you would do that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand names in JS ecosystem out of the window.

I absolutely love the company and am a happy customer, but for the love of time, why give up such a good pun for a name?<p>(For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And &#x27;time now&#x27; is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)

What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that the founders need to align the brand with the vision...<p>Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don&#x27;t rebrand if things are going super well, right?

congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in.<p>I&#x27;ve been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.<p>Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first &quot;hybrid&quot; framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a &quot;Preview&quot; mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don&#x27;t want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:<p>&gt; The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.<p>I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.<p>The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense&#x27;s introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4].<p>I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.<p>Lastly, it&#x27;s also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being &quot;hosted Next.js&quot;. Guillermo&#x27;s blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline &quot;AWS for frontend developers&quot;. How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a &quot;No Code backend&quot;? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace&#x2F;aggregator of frontend demand for backend&#x2F;api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that&#x27;s plenty.<p>---<p>references<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dan_abramov&#x2F;status&#x2F;1193001108102373376" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dan_abramov&#x2F;status&#x2F;1193001108102373376</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reactjs.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;building-great-user-experiences-with-concurrent-mode-and-suspense.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reactjs.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;building-great-user-expe...</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;zth&#x2F;relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do-the-dirty-work-for-you-55kd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;zth&#x2F;relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do...</a><p>3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reactjs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;dtsi1q&#x2F;react_flight&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reactjs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;dtsi1q&#x2F;react_fligh...</a><p>4: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dan_abramov&#x2F;status&#x2F;1239013168682274816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dan_abramov&#x2F;status&#x2F;1239013168682274816</a><p>5: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rauchg.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;vercel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rauchg.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;vercel</a>

Congratulations on the funding Guillermo!

Judging by the comments so far, the name change backlash is of unseen-since-Qwikster proportions…

From unbrandable to unpronounceable.

Literally just discovered Zeit, what I liked about it was the ability to choose different run-times, with a generous free tier, with none of the existential baggage of the other PAAS&#x27;s options out there. Sigh, oh well.

The name &quot;Zeit&quot; was very confusing for Germans. &quot;Zeit&quot; is the regular word for time and there&#x27;s also a newspaper called &quot;Die ZEIT&quot;.

Just great to see how this company grows and produces awesome developer tools, frameworks and platforms to improve the developer and user experience.

Congrats Guillermo!! Vercel is awesome, can&#x27;t wait to see where you take the business. Keep up the great work.

Congrats Guille .. Vamos!!

I use ZEIT for my side projects now. It is extremely efficient and time saver.

ZEIT always sounded me something from Templars.