Posted by bartoindahouse 9 hours ago
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.
price = what_you_can_pay * just_how_much_your_problem_is_hurting_youThat 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 (SQL is probably second). 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.
In what world is SQL out of fashion??
The model is largely "built to be locked in" model. It is not something innovative. The issue is that to what scale of operation the platform considers there customer to be locked in where they can hand them a bill that compensates for the ease of entry model for all the hobby/free tier.
With Vercel I feel like these level is becoming lower and lower. You can within minutes launch a full startup with Vercel and AI assisted coding. And Vercel assumes that as long as you do not recieve any traffic that is good. The moment you recieve even a mild amount of traffic you are considered locked in.
To some people that is a fair trade because they have so little trust in their products in the first place investing hours instead minutes is a fair trade. If the traffic comes they are already in the green. If the traffic does not come any effort they have put in puts them in red. So, you put as little effort as possible to get thing out there.
I like Vercel. They have figured a monetization model for Slop SaaS. The other PaaS needs to catch up. In 2026, PaaS exists as a model to make revenue out of slop.
Our app is small beans, too. We don't even have that many users. To borrow a favorite term from DHH, Vercel are "merchants of complexity."
But they're only half the problem. Our management is the other half. They can't be bothered to grow a spine and move away from Vercel. So we'll just keep paying, and eventually some people will "be affected" by a "reduction in force."
Digitalocean's (not related to them in any way) app platform (and I'm sure many other cloud providers) provides almost everything that vercel does, at a fraction of the cost. I'm surprised this is not a well known fact.
It is the business model to sponsor React, Next.js, the go to frontend and serverless deployment of enterprise headless SaaS products from Sitecore, Optimizely, AEM, SAP, Contentful, Sanity,... thanks to their partnerships that make Vercel the main option.
Vercel is similar to adopting Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2,.... its use is decided at upper level, not what to use for weekend projects.
At face value they look pretty cool, yet they love adding redundant frills.
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 mean, it would only justify being expensive