Vercel Service Markup

A while back I tried to reproduce a Vercel enterprise invoice using logs generated by an external service. After multiple round-trips with their support team I concluded it is actually impossible to verify what was billed even remotely reflected actual usage. It's essentially an AWS reseller in the form of a random number generator attached to some horrific contemporary JS, that the brand is so popular speaks more to the state of the industry than it does the suitability of their product

Seems like “vercel” should be renamed “resell”.

And I also want point out Vercel Enterprise, start from 3000$/m and I can get more things, and also cheaper, better with Cloudflare. A lot vercel features are just not really useful. (Yes, I'm talking about Next.JS)

This is really interesting, kudos to the creator! My only note is that Vercel is probably paying less than you and me, in which case the spread is a bit greater than the &quot;vs. retail&quot; comparison.<p>As I type this the responses are mostly negative, so to balance that I&#x27;d like to point out that (1) integration is often undervalued, and (2) nothing prevents developers from using the other services directly, or even creating and managing their own databases, object storage, etc.

The appeal of a no-ops workflow for basic frontend apps is there. We’ve got a bunch of static docs sites built with vuepress and docusaurus that are a great fit for this. Not that we can’t whip up a CDN with terraform and a CI&#x2F;CD pipeline with preview environments, but my team would rather spend its energy on our core product.<p>However we’ve been badly burned by vercel, netlify and render.com switching their pricing models to user based instead of infrastructure based pricing. We’re migrating to AWS amplify right now, which also happens to be wonderfully integrated into our wider IT landscape with an AWS landing zone, automated internal chargeback etc. It’s 90% the same for our use case and charges only for infra at standard AWS rates.<p>At this point I’m starting to wonder why it isn’t more popular.

This is why I&#x27;m bear-ish on Next.JS as a framework. Vercel has some super cool features for Next.Js that are easy to integrate into your app, but is that de-incentivizing Next.JS to implement them in an open way?<p>Vercel is a hyper for-profit and closed platform, is that blocking innovation on Next.JS as an &quot;open-source&quot; framework?

Serious question: do big companies actually use Vercel? I never worked at a big&#x2F;very big company but I don&#x27;t see how these prices would scale for them

I don&#x27;t quite understand the convenience, R2 and the other services are already quite easy to use. I wrote a simple wrapper that exposes the same API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stillmatic&#x2F;storage-wrapper&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;storage-wrapper&#x2F;index.js#L35">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stillmatic&#x2F;storage-wrapper&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;stor...</a><p>The wrapper is pretty straightforward, I can see how it&#x27;s a teensy bit simpler to have Vercel manage things for you, but it&#x27;s not really much easier...

How do people even afford $0.20 per GB of bandwidth? All it takes is a few videos or images and that will get very expensive.

Some useful info. Renders off center on mobile for me, leading to some cropping.

Gotta love it’s hosted on Vercel. So much for ‘convenience not worth it’.

Vercel raised $300m+ at the top of the market and paid over the odds to hire a ton of JS ecosystem luminaries. Those investors are going want to see a return, not just an eyewatering wage bill. Anyone building on top of their ecosystem is going to get fleeced, they have no other route to possibly justifing their valuation or ever providing a passable return on that capital. Everyone else should be preparing their plan b for what happens if they impode and Next.js, Turborepo etc development fractures or grinds to a halt.

This is a good chart. But I’d argue using Vercel is entirely justified for many indie devs or startups. I bet most won’t get to the point where the extra cost of using Vercel really hurts. If someone is lucky to get there, they can just switch to using Upstash &#x2F; Neon if they feel the benefits of Vercel’s extra layer don’t outweigh the added costs.

Here I am, thinking this was going to be some new service announcement. Clicking on the link, and boom, &quot;Amazing work&quot;.

What&#x27;s the feasibility of replicating Vercel&#x27;s services and architecture?<p>Without supply side limitations, resellers generally become reduced to commodities over time. This is especially likely with high margin markups, which seems to be the case with Vercel.<p>Is the integration of Next.js on Vercel really that superior to other platforms?

Not a Vercel user but when I see such markups, I would like to see alternatives and compare their markups.

You should look at Backblaze B2 instead of Cloudflare, it&#x27;s even cheaper <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.backblaze.com&#x2F;b2&#x2F;cloud-storage-pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.backblaze.com&#x2F;b2&#x2F;cloud-storage-pricing.html</a>

Lee Robinson (VP, Dev Exp @ Vercel) just tweeted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;leeerob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1653636931291602953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;leeerob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1653636931291602953</a>

Well, if nothing else, at least Vercel&#x27;s new integrations have put new things on my map of free things to use in side-projects (I had never heard of Upstash before now) :))

Also Vercel CEO has previous investment in both Upstash and Neon.

goddamn!! what a great idea for a site and will definitely be exploring the alternatives listed! now do a similar one for Netlify or GCP!

How does Neon compare with planetscale for free dB hosting?<p>I know fly also has free dB&#x27;s, but it really isn&#x27;t a managed dB service.

nextjs is sick and I&#x27;ve always been vercel-hesitant. this is probably an app-specific dilemma that should be solved with spreadsheets to compare costs based on your very specific needs.

This is a bit of a copy&#x2F;paste from a comment I made in another thread like three weeks ago[1]:<p>#######<p>I&#x27;m very much starting to distrust these huge companies with infinite product&#x2F;feature lists and generic marketing-lingo websites.<p>&quot;Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.&quot;<p>Seriously?<p>I want serverless providers that tell me the 4-5 products they offer (Compute, maybe a KV store, maybe a database, maybe some pubsub, maybe a queue?), give me the pricing, and leave me the Hell alone.<p>I don&#x27;t want to feel locked into a system promising end-to-end whatever, ones that heavily push a certain framework, and most importantly ones that look like the homepage was designed by a team of sales people instead of a team of engineers.<p>It&#x27;s the difference between the Cloudflare Workers website and the Vercel website: Vercel looks like the new-age big-brother con artist, while Workers looks like a utility.<p>Sorry, what were we talking about? A runaway bill?<p>#######<p>This kind of stuff is exactly why I don&#x27;t trust Vercel. They&#x27;re selling some &quot;&quot;&quot;experience&quot;&quot;&quot; on top of utilities. This works for Apple in the non-technical space, but for developer tools? Absolutely no chance.<p>I wasn&#x27;t going to use Vercel before, but I&#x27;m certainly not going to now.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35508910" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35508910</a>

A whole industry has sprung around charging front end developers for basic server management tasks. They will quite literally pay for anything that means they don&#x27;t have to SSH into Ubuntu server. The irony is they are taking on a ton of overhead with multiple services instead of learning how to set up Nginx and sudo apt install Postgres.

Great dashboard