Vercel Is Ridiculously Expensive

"Ridiculously Expensive" => $50/month??? What kind of product are you building that this isn't covered by less than a handful of customers?

If you're just messing around, yes, that's a lot. If you are running a business with customers, don't waste your time even thinking about saving $50/month.

That's a lot of work for 50 dollars per month - and now you have to always have someone who knows what they're doing in GCP on hand. And I bet they're charging more than the yearly difference for just one day of work...

If you are deploying Next.js, then deploying to Vercel is the best idea for indie hacker. You don't want to build/maintain infrastructure around deployment on AWS or GCP when you starting.

When project grows big and vercel pricing actually starts biting, then jump to other providers.

Don't waste your time on infra in the beginning.

I disagree with this take.

Take it from someone who bootstrapped a company to massive scale (not me):
https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/11-years-of-hosting-a-saas

His recommendation is to stay on managed services as long as possible. You can always optimize costs down the road.

This post exemplifies why it is so hard to create products for developers. They would rather spend weeks building it themselves than pay 50 bucks, only to end up with something worse in the end.

For those of us who haven't looked into the Vercels/Horukus of the world.

Can someone do a different hosting Solutions for "Unsophisticated People!" as to the differences/use cases/etc..

AWS/Digital Ocean/Google/Oracle/Azure

Monitoring
Storage
Redundancy
Database
Security
Web Server Setup
OS setup
Base Dev/Test/Production Setup Env/Etc
3rd Party Partnerships

Thanks!

Check out Render or Porter; both are great options.

We use render and have over 20 services deployed with millions of hits to our APIs for only a few hundred a month.

I pay around 100$/mo for Azure
to handle a couple of projects with five users
this is Ridiculously Expensive

Definitely worth comparing the total cost of ownership before committing to any cloud service.

Vercel is expensive, but it has good DX. However, I now deploy my app on Cloudflare Pages and Workers for pricing.

Pretty typical pricing setup for a PaaS - you're paying for the middle layer between your code and infrastructure.

If you can ship just as fast on GCP and save the $$$, then it's probably worth it.

The way this reads, you migrated off Vercel to save $50 monthly? How many hours did it take to do this migration?

Vercel is a business like anything else, and I suspect these days there is pressure to make a profit over giving away so much free stuff.

To avoid this sort of BS, I am working on my "stack" for future projects and it looks like this:

Boring tech that has hardly changed in 10 years: Postgres, Node, Typescript, Express, Express Plugins, Simple CSS (.css file), Little JS. Can move this anywhere an no crazy breaking changes (Next.js 13 looking at you!)

Boring hosting: Any of AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean etc. Pay the sustainable prices rather than hunt for the free tiers of more "modern" platforms like Vercel, Fly, Render etc.

Generally go for products where the cost of even pricey old AWS is nothing compared to the revenue.

Fyi you can get $600 in credits for Vercel here https://www.joinsecret.com/vercel#vercel-coupon, and up to $200k in GCP credits are available here https://www.joinsecret.com/google-cloud#google-cloud-promocode-200000

Hey plussmart, happy to share we've improved our infrastructure pricing: https://vercel.com/blog/improved-infrastructure-pricing. We've reduced the prices of basics like bandwidth and functions.

We do offer some level of observability on our platform for free (you don't need to purchase Monitoring). Further, we're planning to reduce the Image Optimization price as well. Thank you for this feedback!

I agree that monitoring should be free for Pro users (essentially $20/month), you can get away with it without spending too much. I use AWS for things that are pricey in AWS. Vercel has also just upped their Serverless Functions to 5 minutes of max. duration.

If it can save time and reduce workload, I believe it is worth spending some money

Why not use AWS Amplify for hosting? I'm using it for all of my front-end stuff. Cost way cheaper(first 12 months is free) than Vercel and it comes with basic metrics, server logs, CI/CD pipeline, SSL/TLS configs, etc. Super easy to use. It doesn't provide you with analytics but you can use Google Analytics for free, as you mentioned earlier.

Hey there @plussmart2018,

I completely understand your concerns about Vercel's pricing structure and hidden fees; transparency is essential when choosing a cloud provider. Since you're looking for more cost-effective alternatives, I'd like to recommend DigitalOcean. I've been using their services, specifically their affordable tier, to host my website, a forum project, and an admin panel, all with great success. DigitalOcean provides a reliable and budget-friendly platform, making it easier for developers like us to manage our projects without breaking the bank. If you're interested, I'd be happy to share more details about my experiences. Just let me know if you'd like to chat and discuss cloud hosting options further!

We have two ways to get things done:

1. Manual (doing everything step by step on your own, but it can be too complex and time-consuming)
2. Platform (which can save a lot of time for setting things up, especially if you ship a lot)
3. using boilerplate (victrays.com/try/shipfast) 🤫

I can not imagine that running an app or some services on AWS with a database can be cheaper than on Vercel.
With Vercel, you start with zero or maybe pay for a team account at $20 per month/user and you can run many services.
Sure, in the end it depends on the team size.
I would perhaps opt more for Heroku as an alternative to AWS or GCP.

Like with everything, I think it depends how you use it.
For me, Vercel has been hosting https://loginllama.app for (basically) free.
I use the edge functions and the NextJS static site hosting but that's all.

I do agree though, the markup for the extra services (like edge storage etc) is expensive. But I'd argue the DX is much better than something like cloudflare or AWS.

Using Railway here and I’m very happy

Why don't you analytics setup separately? That's what I do with most of my sites. I have over 8-10 sites on vercel and all I pay is $20/month. Its very cheap if you ask me.

Last month, we got hit by an attack. Because of Vercel's serverless function pricing strategy (+$40 per extra 100 GB-hours), it cost us an extra $400. This happened when we went over the 1,000 GB-hours limit for serverless functions. Just one day of this attack made us spend that extra $400.

Why not just stick with an S3 bucket?

When I started my last project I was tempted to host everything on my own server. Luckily I decided to use the Netlify + Supabase combo.

So far the project is on an very early stage so I haven't paid a single euro, but I know that when (hopefully) have more users and traffic, the prices for these services will be higher than using my own server.

But the fact is that without these platforms it would have taken me 10 times longer to be where I am. That's if I'd been able to, because I have limited knowledge of devops or even back-end development.

As others have already said here, I think this is advice to be very careful with.

"If you can, migrate it out ASAP to other cloud platform, like AWS and GCP." you better know what you are doing on those platforms at that point. These are services that in my opinion can bot be compared with. Vercel is a service that ads a lot of UX on top of these kinds of platforms (in their case aws) so that you don't have to know any of the aws stuff (which is not trivial by any means, and GCP is also not)

For indiehackers I think vercel is a great choice to be totally honest. And to save 50$ a month, if you aren't careful this can end up costing you a lot more.

Now, if you have a very established product with maybe a small devops team you can start to think about this and depending how much you are doing you can actually save a lot more than 50$ a month. But i would argue its not the case of most IH around here.

Wow, I made the switch to hosting my service on Vercel instead of Cloudflare 😅

ike $10 per month for monitoring (this should be free), web analytics Plus (google analytics for free) and source images 5$ per 1000 (what is this?).

none of these should be free 😂

I didn't know they had that kind of extra cost. I'm not sure I need that kind of thing, but I'll definitely take a look to make sure. Thanks for the heads up!

You could self-host it for so much cheaper. These hosting websites are basically scams.