Funny timing - I was just on a call yesterday about renegotiating our enterprise Vercel contract. The Vercel employees on the call were very friendly, and did share information when prompted, BUT I came away from the call with the understanding that yep, their pricing is intentionally opaque. MIUs are 1 unit = $1, but the rate at which MIU are consumed vary by SKU. Which SKUs do you need, which are you using? Best of luck figuring that out. Cache hit? Fast Data Transfer. Cache miss? Fast Data Transfer _and_ Fast Origin Transfer, so 2x the cost.
For what its worth, they have an internal quoting tool, Copper, which we got a glimpse of on the call. This shows super detailed breakdowns of usage and pricing (for quoting, not actually for billing) and would be really useful to see...but of course they couldn't actually share that information with us.
Anyway, /rant. SaaS pricing being complex and not-exactly-user-friendly is nothing new.
No hate to any of the PaaSes out there, Vercel included. They truly serve a need.
That said, if you are an engineer planning on working in/around the field, I would strongly suggest developing some competence at basic Linux systems administration. (Also: learn SQL, even though it's out of fashion.)
Linux is probably the single technology where my knowledge has had the longest useful lifespan. There are Unix (System V) bits I learned decades ago that are still useful today, on Linux.
Then, you can use a PaaS if you want. But if it's not the right fit, you are in a position to do something else. You might find that designing your application with a modern compute stack (this is not a PaaS) gives you an unfair advantage.
If you couldn't be bothered to write it yourself, why should I read it? The same goes for the overly-complex components that express the same idea over and over again, but somehow without adding any clarity.
The wheel you have to spin to have a chance of seeing a new paragraph is so uniquely aggravating it almost feels satirical, like those overcomplicated volume slider UI concepts people were making a while ago. [0]
I was looking at object storage recently and I hadn't realized how much profit cloud providers drive via egress. And it's so perfectly hidden from the marketing. Ended up going with Cloudflare R2 for free egress.
Just imagine if Huggingface used Vercel and paid their prices. It would cost them quite a few dollars for every decent-size model download. (Or AWS egress prices, or any comparable service.)
I'm not a Vercel fan, but the whole pitch of PaaS is you get more than just a provisioned server for your application. The 20$/month/dev is vercel's own concept of what that Dev Experience costs with a profit margin + average usage fees paid to AWS baked-in. They might leave that average low, but they assume you're here because you like vercel's tooling, not that you're price shopping for $/BitsTx'd. AWS will always win in that, because vercel is also AWS with some dipping mustards they really want you to lock into.
The hobby plan is a loss leader to get developers into the vercel tooling. If you go over the free tier's bandwidth limit, you've exceeded what vercel believes that developer goodwill is worth for a single account. If they allowed you to pay for extra bandwidth on your free plan, it would make vercel look like a crap cloud platform, because all you're doing at that point is paying a premium for AWS, and a kneecapped version of their developer tooling. They really want you to pay the 20$/month/dev and experience everything in vercel's platform because that's their only product. Honestly... no fault to them on that.
Maybe they'd gain some developer positivity about letting you dig your account out of the "exceeding the hobby limits" hole that's easy to fall into, but the AWS cost for them is already spent, and that was all the budget for appeasing you. You'll have to pay them to pay AWS anyway, so they draw a hard line at that point and demand you also pay to use the vercel tooling, which is the only thing they make. (or, in theory, telling you to go pay AWS yourself if the tooling is unimportant to you.)
I've never been a Vercel customer and I know their offerings are not entirely comparable but that all seems way expensive compared to Cloudflare. Or Cloudflare plus any cloud service that can autoscale Docker containers and DBs.
I'm assuming the SSO charge is for access to Vercel admin and not end users.
I've had a great experience with cloudflare pages. It doesn't get much easier than using their cli (wrangler) to sync up a local folder. I suppose the exception is SSR, but then again I absolutely despise SSR so I don't think it counts.
I’ve been seeing this pattern a lot recently on HN. Single prompt preachy website designed to get attention.
Even if I’m in support of the subject matter (how many hours apple bugs waste for example), I think it’s generally in bad taste to be wasting the time of everyone on HN by fooling people with a website that’s meant to imitate something thought invoking.
This will be the last month of my Vercel Pro Plan for now. I logged into Vercel just now to see what day of the month the billing period ends so I can move any projects or backup metadata before then, and when I clicked it, the page had the title "March 2026: Monthly Pro Plan". Needless to say, the invoice will not be for March, by any stretch. On the same page it says "This invoice will continue updating until the end of your billing period on May 20."
People aren't ranting about Vercel just because of aversions to trends or their marketing style. It's also because it has legitimately been buggy too often. A year ago I commented on HN about some other issues I experienced and that doesn't include weirdness with their open source or AI stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588909
That said, I still think Vercel is a reasonable choice. Just not my top choice right now.
Serving 1M MAU for $1300/mo sounds like a reasonably good deal to me. I'm not a Vercel customer because I'd rather host my own infrastructure that isn't black-boxed by a bunch of abstraction I don't need. But no one should expect that $20/mo buys you much at all in the way of compute resources or bandwidth. You can't even get a home internet connection for $20 in a lot of places.
Not sure what the author is expecting -- a hosted site to be free forever no matter how big it gets? This site feels like someone grinding the dullest axe on the smallest possible wheel.
For what its worth, they have an internal quoting tool, Copper, which we got a glimpse of on the call. This shows super detailed breakdowns of usage and pricing (for quoting, not actually for billing) and would be really useful to see...but of course they couldn't actually share that information with us.
Anyway, /rant. SaaS pricing being complex and not-exactly-user-friendly is nothing new.
That said, if you are an engineer planning on working in/around the field, I would strongly suggest developing some competence at basic Linux systems administration. (Also: learn SQL, even though it's out of fashion.)
Linux is probably the single technology where my knowledge has had the longest useful lifespan. There are Unix (System V) bits I learned decades ago that are still useful today, on Linux.
Then, you can use a PaaS if you want. But if it's not the right fit, you are in a position to do something else. You might find that designing your application with a modern compute stack (this is not a PaaS) gives you an unfair advantage.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
The hobby plan is a loss leader to get developers into the vercel tooling. If you go over the free tier's bandwidth limit, you've exceeded what vercel believes that developer goodwill is worth for a single account. If they allowed you to pay for extra bandwidth on your free plan, it would make vercel look like a crap cloud platform, because all you're doing at that point is paying a premium for AWS, and a kneecapped version of their developer tooling. They really want you to pay the 20$/month/dev and experience everything in vercel's platform because that's their only product. Honestly... no fault to them on that.
Maybe they'd gain some developer positivity about letting you dig your account out of the "exceeding the hobby limits" hole that's easy to fall into, but the AWS cost for them is already spent, and that was all the budget for appeasing you. You'll have to pay them to pay AWS anyway, so they draw a hard line at that point and demand you also pay to use the vercel tooling, which is the only thing they make. (or, in theory, telling you to go pay AWS yourself if the tooling is unimportant to you.)
They will sell you pay-as-you-go services... but only once you pay their 20$: https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro
Over all, I hate it. But I don't think there's anything too hidden about it, or at least no more than any other PaaS provider.
I'm assuming the SSO charge is for access to Vercel admin and not end users.
Even GCP Firebase and AWS Amplify almost qualify as PaaS.
Even if I’m in support of the subject matter (how many hours apple bugs waste for example), I think it’s generally in bad taste to be wasting the time of everyone on HN by fooling people with a website that’s meant to imitate something thought invoking.
People aren't ranting about Vercel just because of aversions to trends or their marketing style. It's also because it has legitimately been buggy too often. A year ago I commented on HN about some other issues I experienced and that doesn't include weirdness with their open source or AI stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588909
That said, I still think Vercel is a reasonable choice. Just not my top choice right now.
Edit: by the way, remember now.sh? https://x.com/vercel/status/717764348706316288 It's funny that ten years later, there is a similar service with a similar name, exe.dev
Not sure what the author is expecting -- a hosted site to be free forever no matter how big it gets? This site feels like someone grinding the dullest axe on the smallest possible wheel.