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Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

12 points by lumos ↗ HN
Vercel charges low/mid five figures for their enterprise plans, which essentially comes with higher usage limits, some security features like SSO and IP blocking, and an uptime and support SLA. This hardly seems worth the additional cost?

It seems like they need a much better solution somewhere in the mid-tier--Vercel is great to get started on projects, but if you basically need to go from small project to 5 figure bill without much in between, it hardly seems to make sense to use for a project that is going to scale.

23 comments

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solidehue
What extras do you need from Vercel when deploying a basic react app? In theory all you need is an html hosting service if you don’t use any of the fancy react featured…
seatownhack
You can definitely find cheaper options like render, but render is definitely not worth it. Frequent outages and super slim feature set.
sergiotapia
I'm going to launch something new soon hosted on Render. Can you elaborate what features you believe are necessary but missing? I'm also eyeing Northflank.
rbnsl
Yeah it really feels like once your hobby project actually starts making some money, they start charging you insane amounts to compensate the millions of other hobby projects they host that haven’t made a dime yet…
jfoster
Is it expensive or genius? Ultimately, enterprise businesses can definitely afford that, so it's just down to how Vercel can differentiate between them and non-enterprise.

Higher usage can be purchased separately from Enterprise, not as cheap as the initial plan, but far from 5-figures: https://vercel.com/docs/limits/overview#additional-resources

So really we're mostly talking about SLAs. I think "we absolutely need an SLA" seems a decent way to differentiate between small businesses and enterprise businesses.

leros
I don't know about Vercel explicitly, but enterprise plans are usually more than just larger quotas. You get access to solutions engineers that will help you solve problems. You get higher uptime guarantees. You get SLAs like 24 or 48 hours for bug fixes that impact you. You get access to a phone support line where someone picks up immediately. Lots of stuff that reduces risk for your business and your customers. As a business, you can only offer SLAs to your customers that are as strong as the SLAs of your hosting service, so that becomes important once you get into the enterprise world.
lumos
I guess I should rephrase, a true enterprise plan may make sense to cost that much. I think the gap for Vercel seems to be in the in-between stage. They have plans that are super cheap or free for small hobby projects, and the expensive enterprise plan. Not much in between for when you're growing.

The other dilemma for them seems to be in capturing true enterprise customers...if you have those resources, you might just decide to build out your own dev ops/infra team instead of paying big markups on AWS/Cloudflare bills.

leros
To your first point, I think you have to start valuing your time when analyzing the cost. If you have a small growing SaaS, is spending $100-200/mo for hosting really a big deal? Think about the cost of your time. I will gladly pay that kind of hosting cost to not have to spend time doing devops on my small product. I'd rather spend that time on feature development or marketing.

I think your second point is debatable. We used to spend something like $50-100k a year on Heroku which is technically way overpriced, but hiring even a single devops person to move us to AWS would have been much more expensive and introduced all sorts of risk. I think a medium sized company is fine paying $100-300k to something like Heroku as long as the offerings are fitting the architectural needs. And Heroku is AWS so you can always use some AWS services alongside your Heroku stuff.

moomoo11
It’s a VC fueled project around something you can set up in a few hours if you took a few hours to learn. Imo.

But for large companies making millions or billions it’s a convenience that saves engineering costs.

solardev
You can set it up in a few hours, but it's a pain to maintain. Every preview deployment, every DNS change, every logging interface, every serverless tie-in, every CDN and caching setup and invalidation... those are all wastes of time if you just want to get a website up and running. Or for $20/mo they can handle it all with much better reliability. It's a hard value to beat.

If you're big enough to need the Enterprise plan, sure, you could build your own, but apparently enough of their customers don't want to.

FWIW, because of Vercel, I would personally never launch another website on a lower level cloud host (like EC2/S3) again. It's just not worth the time and setup. The higher level of abstraction that Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, etc provide is very nice for DX and time savings.

moomoo11
Yeah sure for personal projects. I personally use cloud flare pages and workers, and my own UI projects.

The poster asked about the enterprise tier.

Do you put a team of a few devs / million plus dollars per year or 50k.

vunderba
I guess it just depends. My experience was completely different. I've got my NextJS app setup through Github action (trigger on push to a prod branch) that deploys as a dockerized container to my VPS and a preview branch that deploys to a separate nginx restricted firewalled site for purposes of previewing.

Never had any issues with upgrades/downtime for over a year now - it's pretty fire and forget.

Native vercel serverless functions running in Vercel are also highly restricted (10 seconds in hobby, and no more than 60 seconds in Pro) which I also don't have to worry about.

solardev
> I've got my NextJS app setup through Github action (trigger on push to a prod branch) that deploys as a dockerized container to my VPS and a preview branch that deploys to a separate nginx restricted firewalled site for purposes of previewing.

That seems like a pretty big pain, though, compared to a single click on Vercel and you get that same functionality for free. What's the advantage of doing it yourself? Each of those steps is quite a lot of work (few hours the first time? sure you can automate it for reuse later, but it still sounds much more of a hassle than the nice Vercel GUI). And what happens when part of the stack needs updates? (The VPS, or DOcker, or a Github action or one of its dependencies, or Nginx, or the firewall, or the rules...)

> Native vercel serverless functions running in Vercel are also highly restricted (10 seconds in hobby, and no more than 60 seconds in Pro) which I also don't have to worry about.

That's a looooong time for a serverless func to run. Curious, what do you use them for?

vunderba
oh yeah, I'm pretty comfortable to managing a debian distro. Definitely the first time was a bit of a pain, but I built a template for my subsequent projects and now its about 20 minutes of work for a totally new repo.

I also just don't like handing the keys to the kingdom over to Vercel as it were (just a personal preference really). I'm working on migrating over to a privately instanced Gitea so that I don't have to depend on Github either for my deployments but that's still in the works.

So I actually use serverless functions as ad-hoc "workers" if I don't feel like setting up a full fledged backend API - so sometimes they'll be working for upwards of a minute on a request and then lodge the final results in a notification-redis. It's not really what serverless functions are intended for, but... it's nice to sometimes not have to deal with building an entirely separate backend.

Since I control the VPS, I can easily spin up more resources to scale without worrying about Vercels payment options. It also makes it easier to migrate somewhere else if I want to since its dockerized - trivial to move to Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, AWS, etc.

A friend of mine whose project sort of blew up and went viral also said that while the autoscalibility of Vercel was very nice - it was a bit of a double edged sword, he mentioned that it was extraordinarily difficult to figure out which routes and files werer contributing to his high usage on his bill. Maybe things have changed, that was a few years back.

solardev
Why don't you just use the Pro plan? The Enterprise pricing on these things is usually for peace of mind / tossing the buck to your vendor when something goes down. It primarily buys you an SLA and better support.

I've hosted many sites on Vercel and never noticed issues or significant downtime on any of their plans, Enterprise or Pro.

It seems to me that their other plans are basically loss leaders for their Enterprise offerings, but if you're a solo dev or small biz prototyping something, there is no need to go enterprise yet.

lulznews
Is vercel just hosting for react devs?
leerob
Hey, good news. We just announced improved infrastructure pricing, including reduced prices for bandwidth and functions. This should help folks scale better on Vercel as they pay on-demand.

Let me know if you have any questions.

https://vercel.com/blog/improved-infrastructure-pricing

meiraleal
You missed the indication of a shameless plug. This post was created to complain about abusive behavior, not to promote another way to scam more money after stealing an open source project.
meiraleal
Because we, React developers, let them do it, unfortunately. The scam about Vercel controlling React development was done entirely for this, create a new cash cow.