6 ms·
Vercel Service Markup
- treeface9000 3y ago[dead]
- thelittleone 3y agoSome useful info. Renders off center on mobile for me, leading to some cropping.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoGreat dashboard
- smallshen 3y agoAnd 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)
- mardix 3y agoHere I am, thinking this was going to be some new service announcement. Clicking on the link, and boom, "Amazing work".
- Aeolun 3y agoGotta love it’s hosted on Vercel. So much for ‘convenience not worth it’.
- chipgap98 3y agoI think it is hosted on vercel to troll vercel
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoThis is a bit of a copy/paste from a comment I made in another thread like three weeks ago[1]: ####### I'm very much starting to distrust these huge companies with infinite product/feature lists and generic marketing-lingo websites. "Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration." Seriously? 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. I don'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. It'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. Sorry, what were we talking about? A runaway bill? ####### This kind of stuff is exactly why I don't trust Vercel. They're selling some """experience""" on top of utilities. This works for Apple in the non-technical space, but for developer tools? Absolutely no chance. I wasn't going to use Vercel before, but I'm certainly not going to now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508910
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agohah. that was exactly my impression too. years ago, they showed a command like "next up" or something and boom your app is deployed. never used it. didn't even look into it, just assumed it would cost an arm and a leg because there's no way they wouldn't add a bunch of markup ontop of a basic vps
- beginnings 3y agoA 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'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.
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoI dont think this is the right argument to make. People do this not to avoid setting up nginx and Postgres, they do it to avoid needing to worry about scalability later down the line. Yes, for hobby projects and proofs of concept you can easily get away with a VPS from DigitalOcean or Vultr (are they still around?), but for anything with super variable traffic? Planning to post a link to HackerNews or ProductHunt? Cloudflare Workers and Fauna keep your site online, the VPS crashes.
- beginnings 3y agoWhat percentage of projects ever need that scale? Is it not something crazy like 95% of startups fail? A lot of the successful ones will be in niche categories as well that just don't have scale problems like major social media and tech companies.
- dmw_ng 3y agoA 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
- zamnos 3y agoIs it their random number generator or are the reselling that off AWS as well? Because have you tried to navigate AWS billing?
- Trystanr 3y agoHave you tried to navigate AWS in general? Boggles my mind that they have built so much infrastructure on top of what is a truly awful UI.
- _fat_santa 3y agoI feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome because I really don't mind it, through granted I've now spent just about every day of the past year staring at a various AWS dashboard. Overall I think AWS is one of the greatest products to ever come about in my lifetime, though I think one of their greatest fumbles is not getting AWS Amplified more right, they could have squashed both Vercel, Netlify and most other "resellers" like a bug.
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y agohorrific contemporary JS lol It's straight up one of the smoothest developer experiences ever to exist.
- orliesaurus 3y agoSerious question: do big companies actually use Vercel? I never worked at a big/very big company but I don't see how these prices would scale for them
- paxys 3y agoNext.js is incredibly popular in the industry. Some of the largest companies out there use it. Whether they host on Vercel or not I can't say, but I'm sure that number isn't zero. Of course we are talking more about auxiliary stuff like landing pages, marketing sites, blogs and documentation, not hosting for their core business.
- satvikpendem 3y agoVercel's revenue was 25.5 million in 2022 (according to Nathan Latka who has pretty reputable figures) on a 2.5 billion dollar valuation [0]. They're hyped but it doesn't seem like any big players actually use them at scale, as it's likely much, much cheaper to host on bare cloud providers like AWS, which Vercel themselves wrap (with Vercel also now wrapping the services included in OP's site). [0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel
- chrisco255 3y agoHow does Latka get its data?
- satvikpendem 3y agoHe interviews them on condition of revealing the numbers, which he sells to investors. He has enough clout in the industry that people want to reveal their numbers to him in exchange for being able to raise more money.
- 015a 3y agoI know of five or six companies using Next; none of them use Vercel. I tend to think that their moat against “write a five line dockerfile” just isn’t all that large. I use Vercel for my personal site; I’m familiar with the product suite; I genuinely don’t know why anyone would pay the markup beyond not knowing better. The auto branch deployments on PRs is pretty cool.
- alberth 3y agoSeems like “vercel” should be renamed “resell”.
- seabrookmx 3y agolol not sure why you're being downvoted. I'll point out this is nothing new. Heroku being another (maybe dated) example. Fly.io isn't perfect but I have to hand it to them, atleast they self-host and work to differentiate their stack.
- re-thc 3y agoI'd argue even Heroku is a lot more reasonable in markup.
- tobase 3y agoGreat one !
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- radicalriddler 3y agoThis is why I'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? Vercel is a hyper for-profit and closed platform, is that blocking innovation on Next.JS as an "open-source" framework?
- chrisco255 3y agoNot really. Next.js is built on Node.js + React (both of which are also open source). The services Vercel offers have to do with deployment mainly. That's never going to be something a back end or front end framework will help you with directly. App hosting and deployment has always been a secondary concern. Choice of database, caching, queuing service, etc has also always been a secondary concern apart from a backend/frontend framework.
- krono 3y agoRight around the time when Vercel introduced their performance analytics upsell service, they deleted the NextJS documentation on "web vitals" gathering - same thing, but without the service. Then again when they introduced their new Image component for the longest time it would by default use Vercel's paid image optimisation services, eventually it could be disabled but only with some weird and poorly/confusingly documented custom configuration entry. There are more instances of similar such questionable actions by the NextJS maintainers. I'd rather have seen them just be open about what drove them to do these things.
- radicalriddler 3y agoThe image one was what I had in mind as well. Looks like they've updated the documentation with code snippets to help people out a little more, but back when I first did it, those docs were SLIM
- chipgap98 3y agoYeah I've switched all of my projects to Remix to get out of the Vercel ecosystem
- msy 3y agoVercel 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.
- throwaway4good 3y agoContrary to what we think of ourselves, developers are easily bought off and subject to influencer campaigns.
- pavlov 3y agoMarketing to developers is so effective specifically because developers imagine themselves immune to marketing.
- reducesuffering 3y agoLetting Vercel handle developing half your infra for you. Expensive. Paying twice the $300k engineers to develop your VC scale app in 2023 using HTML templates or Create React App. Priceless
- mhoad 3y agoIt’s really not an either / or scenario at all. There are tons of really good solutions to this problem that are incredibly affordable but they just aren’t popular in the React ecosystem which is once again off doing its own thing seemingly detached from everyone else and trying to just fit the React mental model into any abstraction they come across and patting themselves on the back about innovation in the process. Honestly React is an actively terrible place to have as your center of the universe when trying to build the kind of app you described. Not to say you can’t or shouldn’t use it but it most certainly shouldn’t be where the core is.
- 3y ago
- CharlesW 3y agoThis 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 "vs. retail" comparison. As I type this the responses are mostly negative, so to balance that I'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.
- paxys 3y agoThe point isn't to care about what Vercel is paying but what you the end user are paying/saving when using the two services being compared.
- CharlesW 3y agoMy point is that Vercel's markup is higher than what's listed if Vercel is paying less than retail. As a specific example, if Vercel is paying Neon 10¢/GB/month for storage, Vercel's markup vs. their costs is 200% instead of 150%.
- huac 3y agoI don'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: https://github.com/stillmatic/storage-wrapper/blob/main/storage-wrapper/index.js#L35 https://github.com/stillmatic/storage-wrapper/blob/main/stor... The wrapper is pretty straightforward, I can see how it's a teensy bit simpler to have Vercel manage things for you, but it's not really much easier...
- jrudolph 3y agoThe 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/CD pipeline with preview environments, but my team would rather spend its energy on our core product. 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. At this point I’m starting to wonder why it isn’t more popular.
- chrisco255 3y agoAmplify is the most vendor-specific locked in stack you could possibly choose. If you don't want to be burned by vendors changing the pricing model on you, don't choose a proprietary stack to build on.
- jrudolph 3y agoI’m pretty confident of all the players in that market AWS is the least likely to pull that move.
- tobase 3y agoIt’s simple. It’s not more popular because of bad UX. I would not be surprised if the best customer that Vercel chasing is also a customer that can add these costs to their customer or take a hit on the margin.
- ElFitz 3y agoBad UX. Mediocre DX. Average documentation. Unreliable tools.
- brundolf 3y agoI've been wondering what the limits of the user-based pricing actually are If it's just the number of people who can go in the UI and press the button (when it automatically gets deployed from git anyway), or change env secrets, can't you just have a single admin account and call it "one user"? That could be a single actual person (how often do you change those things?) or could even be a single account shared by the whole team What am I missing?
- PaulWaldman 3y agoWhat's the feasibility of replicating Vercel's services and architecture? 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. Is the integration of Next.js on Vercel really that superior to other platforms?
- moneywoes 3y agoits the marketing
- alexghr 3y agoWell, if nothing else, at least Vercel'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) :))
- langsoul-com 3y agoHow does Neon compare with planetscale for free dB hosting? I know fly also has free dB's, but it really isn't a managed dB service.
- nikita 3y agoNeon CEO here. Much much better :) On a serious note, Neon is Postgres and Planetscale is MySQL. Neon has 100% compat with Postgres and Planetscale supports most but not all MySQL. Neon has unlimited storage a single node compute. Planetscale is scale out architecture on top of Vitess. Neon scales to 0 and more cost effective b/c the architecture.
- kiwicopple 3y agohey nikita, just checking the 100% postgres compatibility. From what I understand there isn't any logical replication: https://community.neon.tech/t/plans-for-logical-replication/219/2 https://community.neon.tech/t/plans-for-logical-replication/... This prevents makes it incompatible with our Realtime server and a few other CDC tools like Debezium (mentioned previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33912348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33912348)
- nikita 3y agoAgree on the callout. This one we are going to enable soon so it's fixable. So the correction is that it's architecturally possible, but temporarily disabled. Hope we will be able to run Supabase on it soon! Also there are some storage plugins that won't work b/c we take over Postgres low level storage.
- harshitgangal 3y agoLikewise in Vitess. It is architecturally possible to add 100% compatibility :)
- nikita 3y ago
- adasound 3y agonextjs is sick and I'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.
- A6gYPfxNas 3y agogoddamn!! what a great idea for a site and will definitely be exploring the alternatives listed! now do a similar one for Netlify or GCP!
- charcircuit 3y agoHow 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.
- howon92 3y agoThis 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 / Neon if they feel the benefits of Vercel’s extra layer don’t outweigh the added costs.
- francoismassot 3y agoNot a Vercel user but when I see such markups, I would like to see alternatives and compare their markups.
- shmde 3y agoAlso Vercel CEO has previous investment in both Upstash and Neon.
- karaokeyoga 3y agoLee Robinson (VP, Dev Exp @ Vercel) just tweeted: https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1653636931291602953 https://twitter.com/leeerob/status/1653636931291602953
- aylmao 3y agoThat tweet by Lee Robinson isn't really about markup, it's about unbound spending, which seems to be more related to, for example, this recent complaint where a bug led to an accidental $3380 bill in just 6 hours https://twitter.com/shoeboxdnb/status/1643639119824801793 https://twitter.com/shoeboxdnb/status/1643639119824801793
- somsak2 3y agoYou should look at Backblaze B2 instead of Cloudflare, it's even cheaper https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html