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Ask HN: Is cloudfare workers better than Vercel? (free tier)

1 points by rohansrma ↗ HN
Recently, I reached my vercel's free tier resources and the paid plain is a bit too expensive for a non-profit application (placeprep.app)

is switching to cloudfare workers a good idea?

14 comments

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solyin
Depends on you and the code backing your app so all I can really say is that Cloudflare's free tier is quite generous and Vercel can (not necessarily will!) bankrupt you if you're not making money with your app. The problem is that switching isn't free, even in today's AI assisted way, so you have to balance the opportunity cost to port to their platform. (Rhetorical) What other tasks are on your to-do that you aren't going to be working on while you work on porting to Cloudflare?
rohansrma
migrating to cloudfare is not a pain but I'm just thinking is migrating worth it?

Ik the vercel's pricing and I can't afford it at this moment. Is there any best alternative where I can switch for a long time?

Theophane_Rame
My take: Choose Cloudflare for cost savings; choose Vercel for convenience with Next.js
rohansrma
I was reading the cloudfare docs and they also works well for nextjs now.
diancodes
What limit did you hit though? Would help to look at that specifically?
rohansrma
fluid active cpu, isr reads, fast origin transfer, and cdn requests
seanw265
Make sure you're taking full advantage of the CDN cache. Cache hits should help reduce your active cpu, isr reads, and origin transfer, although they won't reduce CDN requests.

When you say Vercel's paid plan is too expensive, is the $20/month starting price itself the issue, or are you expecting your usage to push the bill higher than that?

For context, this is almost exactly what I'm trying to solve with Easel.sh (https://www.easel.sh). We're building a Vercel-compatible hosting platform, but with a lower cost structure because we operate much of the infrastructure ourselves rather than being built on top of AWS like Vercel.

rohansrma
thank you for that suggestion. I'm not taking advantage of CDN cache. I think it will add a huge impact as you mentioned/.

For the vercel part, my application <https://placeprep.app> (mentioning again that it's a non-profit application) is going so well even when I stopped marketing for it. I'm kind of afraid with the vercel's pricing even the starting $20 because it will be more than enough for me and mostly get wasted.

I checked easel and as compared to vercel's hobby plan, it's not that good for me rn. Happy to give it a shot if it's nextjs compatible. I will try to host my personal portfolio (<https://rohansrma.me>) there and a few side projects.

seanw265
Thanks for checking out Easel! And congrats on your app's success.

Out of curiosity, would a $10/month plan with $10 in included usage make Easel more attractive for you? This is really useful feedback as we're figuring out our pricing.

And yes, we have first-class support for Next.js on Easel. We support App Router, Pages Router, SSR, ISR, Server Actions, etc. natively without an adapter.

I'd love to hear how it goes with your portfolio and side projects. If you run into any issues deploying them, please let me know and I'll be happy to help.

rohansrma
Yes, that $10 plan would be super great.

Also, can you please add Entire support?