vercel.comcontributed by Samuele Ongaro
The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying.
Deploys a frontend from a git push and serves it from an edge network. It builds the site, gives every branch a preview URL, runs serverless and edge functions, and handles the domains, certificates and caching underneath.
Do not rebuild the edge network — but look hard at the bill, because this is one of the subscriptions people most often outgrow by surprise. The network is real and you cannot build it. What surprises people is everything metered around it: function invocations, image optimisation, bandwidth and build minutes. FIRST, THE AUDIT - **Image optimisation is billed per source image**, and a page that optimises the same picture at eight sizes is eight transformations. Pre-resize at build time and the line often disappears - Functions billed per invocation add up quietly. Check whether a static file or a cache header would do instead - Bandwidth on a site nobody optimised is usually a few large images - Do that audit before deciding anything. It regularly removes the reason to leave, and it makes the site faster either way WHEN TO KEEP PAYING - Preview deployments per pull request, which are the feature genuinely worth the money - A global audience where the edge network is doing real work WHEN TO SELF-HOST - One application with a mostly regional audience. A VPS with Caddy and a delivery network in front costs a fraction, and the shape is under Heroku and Netlify elsewhere in this catalogue WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE - Build in CI, copy the output, switch a symlink, reload. Twenty lines - Caddy for automatic TLS; hashed assets immutable for a year and HTML short with stale-while-revalidate - A preview per branch as a subdomain with a wildcard certificate, another twenty lines, covering the feature people miss most - Rent a delivery network for static assets. That is the part worth paying for and it is cheap on its own AND THE PART THAT IS NOT HOSTING Most sites that feel slow are slow because of what they send, not where it is served from. Resize images to the sizes used, self-host the font subset, and set a size budget in CI. Those three do more than any platform. THE ONE-LINE VERSION Audit image optimisation and function invocations first. Then decide whether you are paying for the network or for a page nobody optimised.
What you lose
- A global edge network you would otherwise have to rent and operate yourself
- A preview deployment for every branch, with its own URL, which is a review workflow as much as a hosting feature
- Instant rollback to any previous deployment, atomically, without a build
- DDoS absorption and TLS certificate management at the edge
- Somebody else's on-call rota — the actual thing a hosting platform sells
If you would rather not build
- Render — paid, single-region services with managed databases
What it costs
read from their page 15 Aug 2026
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Last read |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | $20/mo | — | 15 Aug 2026 |
Their pricing page is where these came from. Seeing a different price? Tell us.
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Dokku
$0A small platform on one machine: push to deploy, with buildpacks.
dokku/dokkufree · open source
Kamal
$0Deploys containers to servers you own, with zero-downtime rollovers.
basecamp/kamalfree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
15/100
Verdict no at 15 — the lowest in this set. You are not paying for software you could write; you are paying for an edge network, build infrastructure and an on-call team. The prompt therefore buys back the deployment ergonomics on one box rather than pretending to rebuild the platform.
History
tracked since 6 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Questions about Vercel
answered from the record above
Is Vercel free?
No — the plan we track is $20 a month. Pro, $20 per user per month, which includes $20 of usage credit; bandwidth, function invocations and build minutes are billed on top.
Can you replace Vercel by building your own?
KEEP IT. The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying. Replacement score 15 out of 100, build time longer than it saves. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does Vercel cost?
$20 a month on Pro — $240 a year. Recorded 6 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing Vercel?
A global edge network you would otherwise have to rent and operate yourself; A preview deployment for every branch, with its own URL, which is a review workflow as much as a hosting feature; Instant rollback to any previous deployment, atomically, without a build; DDoS absorption and TLS certificate management at the edge; Somebody else's on-call rota — the actual thing a hosting platform sells. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Vercel?
Yes: Coolify, Dokku, Kamal. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
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TursoEvery week, something stops being worth paying for.
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