Alternative PAAS without the gotchas? Would appreciate proven alternatives. Thanks.

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.

My favorite Vercel pricing was the one where their AI token offering is just a wrapper around OpenRouter, and where OpenRouter has a few models for free, Vercel was charging for them.

Looking now, Arcee is no longer free, but the exact same tokens/model costs more on Vercel.

https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models?providers=arcee-ai

https://openrouter.ai/provider/arcee-ai

arcee-ai/trinity-large-thinking

Vercel: $0.25/M $0.90/M

Arcee: $0.25/M $0.80/M

It's fantastic that they let user purchase SSO as an add-on!

Pure slop page, even by recent HN submission standards. Straight from Opus' mouth, minimal editing done.

Excellent work - thank you!

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.

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

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.