Vercel team pricing is a joke you get a free slot for billing members. I use DigitalOcean and AWS but both are not so easy to use if you know how you never go back to Vercel
Coolify on Hetzner is the most cost effective solution, Hetzner servers for the same prices are more powerful (more CPU cores, higher RAM) than others like DigitalOcean.
Seconding & I havenāt even really used it much. The capabilities are seemingly awesome and the developer is obsessed with his project. I suspect Coolify isnāt going to continue to have success and hopefully will be around for a long time.
DigitalOcean is simpler and more user-friendly, ideal for beginners and small to medium projects. AWS offers a vast range of advanced features, scalability, and enterprise-grade solutions but has a steeper learning curve. It's what Vercel uses in the background. Choose DigitalOcean for ease of use and AWS for extensive capabilities.
you can check out something like Coolify, Netlify, or Render. all have varying costs and pros/cons.
that said, you always pay any cost with a mix between time and money. vercel gets your frontend deployed insanely fast, has a ton of best practices baked in, and is trusted by several large production appsā¦but it costs money.
want to glue all this together yourself and have a lower monthly bill with AWS? you can totally do that, but what you arenāt paying in money youāre paying in time and resources. there are other implicit costs to this as well, but this has the lowest financial bill.
every project and company is different and has their own values and principles. i personally think vercel is worth it. even if your team expands to 10 people ($200/mo with a rate of $20/mo/seat), that is radically lower than any monthly developer pay. it allows you to spend more time building your unique product and less time on infrastructure.
Yep. People here balk at cost but for most the difference is less than an hour's work every month. There's something to be said for a system that "just works".
you can definitely use any of those. again, those services don't come with a "plug and play" experience like Vercel does.
AWS, GCP, and Azure fit more into the "provider" space vs the "service" space. a lot of the services are built on top of these providers. the provider might be cheaper financially, but you then pay in time to build what these services give you out of the box.
Vercel, Render and Coolify fit more into the "services" space. Render, for example, ships with a bunch of comparable features like preview environments based off git branching. these services have more abstractions and primitives for you to get going fast.
if you want the Vercel experience and you don't already have a bunch of existing infrastructure, i personally think it's better to just use Vercel. some people love AWS (or other providers), have multiple parts of their project(s) there, and want to keep everything in one platform. that can also work. everything is about understanding the trade-offs at a high level.
the main point of this post is to be aware that you might be paying a lot more in time than money if you want "the Vercel experience" but think you can build it yourself. it's not trivial work, there's a lot of nuances, and it's likely not going to be nearly as good as what a company valued at $3.25b who has a team of engineers full-time on this are building.
How much are you paying that developer per month? What is their effective hourly rate? How many hours are you going to spend migrating to something other than vercel?
$40 a month is actually not that much money in the context of a business where youāre paying people thousands per month for their labour.
So true. If one 150h dev gets distracted or has to fiddle around with anything for even 30 minutes - or the other stakeholders need preview branches - this flips quickly.
But Iāve been in situations where I was adding 8+ students to a group project, and I just couldnāt afford it. One of those people might not even contribute that month. I donāt have a solution, but I feel like thereās a pricing model thatās _different_ - and could work for everyone. Iām happy to spend money. But I canāt spend money on barely used āslots.ā
Sure. But I come from a finance background and have a frugal mindset in life and in business. I know there is no way that what I am using vercel for would cost $20/seat anywhere else. The team will grow, that $40 is not a fixed cost. As a young company, I donāt think itās a bad thing to want to save cash anywhere I can.
You didnāt answer their question, though. What is the cost of migrating to another service vs just paying $40? Have you done a CBA, or are you just jumping right into a migration?
The migration itself could be done in a day, like I said itās mostly static hosting. A few functions. Nothing crazy.
Would almost undoubtedly be less monetary consumption to migrate than stay.
"Done in a day"
At a rate of 2 devs, $40/hr, 8hr day, that's a $640 jump.
What's your actual cost benefit analysis to jumping ship to somewhere else *right now*? Do you anticipate having significant downtime as a result of going to another service that wouldn't happen with Vercel? Such as poor documentation for hosting a Next app on their service.
That's ultimately what you need to look at. Not the fact that you're paying $240/year per person. But how much additional costs will come from shopping around.
When I say done in a day, I mean I can do it on my own in a very insignificant amount of time. Iām not on salary, I donāt technically have a ārate.ā Not to say my time is worthless.
I donāt think it would take more than a few hours tops, but obviously this varies with whatever platform I choose, which is up in the air hence this post.
It took me 10 minutes to deploy to Vercel, so even something slightly more complex, I canāt imagine itāll be much longer.
How can I consider the opportunity cost when I donāt even know what I am moving to? I am not sure when I said I wouldnāt consider the cost. I did, however, say it will vary depending on what I choose. This post is purely fielding ideas.
Yes, of course. I mentioned I know my time is not worthless. But building a company is different than working a w2 gig (not that thereās anything wrong with a w2 job, ofc). Lots of different considerations.
Iām not trying to sound stubborn. But please read the context of my original post and these replies. I am looking for something that has similar features to vercel, without the ābig startup returning money to VCsā pricing model. Thatās all.
Iām not looking for a super complicated solution that would be cheaper but take hours to spin up. In my original post I said ideally I want something that is basically vercel but cheaper. It seems that exists with coolify and a VPS?
If it takes me 2 hours to save $240 per year per team member (which, I expect to grow the team by another 3-4 people by December). Thatās significant in the scope of my early business.
Given your income could be made at X company for Y rate, you need to be considering this as a cost factor when making opportunity cost decisions for your business.
If you could make $50/hr at some company, then when you spend 3 hours working on something that was a $150 opportunity cost.
You can further factor in future income potential multiplied by the probability of successfully reaching that income. Most business owners assume 100% odds of success though, as the more realistic 10% odds is quite defeating.
I'll say this though... I tried to deploy a NextJS app as a subdomain to my own website... **it was impossible.** I spent hours and hours trying to make it work, and I could not figure out why it didn't work. The homepage was fine, but trying to go to any further routes it would break. I never figured out why, and there is virtually zero documentation to help.
That's the risk you take when deploying somewhere else with Next. It works, until it doesn't. I probably lost in the vicinity of $1,000 in opportunity costs with how long I spent trying to make it work.
I've got a personal website using NextJS 14 that is hosted somewhere other than Vercel. It is a challenge for sure. The biggest consideration is that the people who are hosting the app are also the ones who built the framework. So as you are pointing out, all of the overhead and headache of maintaining Next in relation to your host, is taken care of.. by that host.
When something goes wrong with my website my host would just say "lol and?"
This. I've got a small company myself and changed all my hosting to a single digital ocean droplet. With nginx to resolve the different domains. I deploy via gitlab ci/cd with SSH but you can probably do something similar with github. Because SSL is free with Let's Encrypt it saved me quite some monthly costs.
Also if you're running nextjs static sites you can look into gitlab pages. It's free hosting and I use Cloudflair to add my custom domains to it. But if you need server side stuff a Digital ocean droplet is the way to go.
How powerful is your server? I love this in theory- but I feel like I really need to jump a few pricing tiers before I can justify running a bunch of docker containers.
I run a regular 4 GiB 2 vCPUs droplet, which cost $24 a month. I used to pay about $ 12 a month per domain with hosting. So running 3 sites on it would already be saving money. I run way more than those are but mostly either static sites or fairly low computing heavy sites. I think about 15 in total. Which otherwise would have cost my close to 200 a month. But the thing is, most of those websites are projects of mine, client websites all run on their own droplet, but the clients pay for that, the topic was about cutting your own cost and this is a fairly easy way to do that.
I actually run a seconds droplet, the cheapest tier, which is my gitlab runner. Handles my docker in docker ci/cd builds without any problem. Makes me think my other droplet could even be cheaper probably.
This pretty much - Iāve used various services and digitalocean is always my go to. I run most of my heavy trafficked apps out of one droplet.
I recently tried vercel for another web app that blew up even more and vercel pricing isnāt ideal but not too crazy yet. The new pricing scheme is not good though so Iāll be looking to move
Yeah this should be a success story.
Instead itās a complaint about charging $40 per person per month, for a company of two people, to host an ENTERPRISE app. Comedic!
Hi, I run these apps on my VPS with 4vCore, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB NVMe, I spend around ā¬17 / month for this server.
This is my VPS for personal projects, currently have 9 Next.js apps and 1 WordPress site.
Regarding traffic: itās basically zero since these apps are only stored to showcase my work to new customers if they want to see it.
I occasionally update these apps to keep Next.js and other packages up-to-date. The auto-rebuild feature on repo push saves me plenty of time.
I use Railway for most things. Traditional servers not serverless.
Spin up a Node.js server and database, connect GitHub for deployments.
https://railway.app/template/0csXuv
I recently built my first SAAS product for writers.
Initially I deployed it on the Vercel but looking at their pricing at the scale level I moved to the AWS amplify.
Ha, it takes time to deploy but it works smoothly.
At the start you need to feedle with it for some time but after that it is cool.
you could use aws or google cloud. But just take a minute to think about the time that developer will need to get everything that's included in Vercel to work on there. It'll be a hell of a lot more than 20$ every month if you're not hiring Indians or whatever.
I rented a bare metal server. It costs me $100 a month so definitely more but I run caprover on it and anytime I like I can spool up a droplet or publish right from GitHub and it just works.
Currently running like 7 droplets on it that all automatically build from gitlab. So if you have more uses I highly recommend I bet you can find somethin cheaper just depends on your workload needs.
if you're interested in serverless, checkout SST. Basically makes it really easy to host a next application on AWS serverless functions without having to touch any nasty AWS stuff
Devs are expensive, 40$ USD a month doesn't sounds that much in comparison , to paying for example ~50$/hour.Ā
The Best thing you could do is host it by yourself with a service like coolify and a VPS, you could reduce the hosting to 5$ month in a cheap VPS.
Your best bet is AWS. Amplify Gen2 is not perfect but way better than Gen1 and you pretty much only pay for compute.
If you start a new account itās practically free for a year depending on your user base.
That being said, Vercel still has better Dx.
Vercel team pricing is a joke you get a free slot for billing members. I use DigitalOcean and AWS but both are not so easy to use if you know how you never go back to Vercel
Check out coolify. You install it on a vps and get vercel-like features
Will look into coolify!
Coolify on Hetzner is the most cost effective solution, Hetzner servers for the same prices are more powerful (more CPU cores, higher RAM) than others like DigitalOcean.
Is there anyone who benchmarked the differences in pricing/server power/features? Would love to read through something like that.
this š
Seconding & I havenāt even really used it much. The capabilities are seemingly awesome and the developer is obsessed with his project. I suspect Coolify isnāt going to continue to have success and hopefully will be around for a long time.
What's the difference between digitalocean and aws? Ease of use wise and features wise?
aws has more features
DigitalOcean is simpler and more user-friendly, ideal for beginners and small to medium projects. AWS offers a vast range of advanced features, scalability, and enterprise-grade solutions but has a steeper learning curve. It's what Vercel uses in the background. Choose DigitalOcean for ease of use and AWS for extensive capabilities.
digital ocean egress is practically free
you can check out something like Coolify, Netlify, or Render. all have varying costs and pros/cons. that said, you always pay any cost with a mix between time and money. vercel gets your frontend deployed insanely fast, has a ton of best practices baked in, and is trusted by several large production appsā¦but it costs money. want to glue all this together yourself and have a lower monthly bill with AWS? you can totally do that, but what you arenāt paying in money youāre paying in time and resources. there are other implicit costs to this as well, but this has the lowest financial bill. every project and company is different and has their own values and principles. i personally think vercel is worth it. even if your team expands to 10 people ($200/mo with a rate of $20/mo/seat), that is radically lower than any monthly developer pay. it allows you to spend more time building your unique product and less time on infrastructure.
Yep. People here balk at cost but for most the difference is less than an hour's work every month. There's something to be said for a system that "just works".
Why not GCP, Azure or AWS?
you can definitely use any of those. again, those services don't come with a "plug and play" experience like Vercel does. AWS, GCP, and Azure fit more into the "provider" space vs the "service" space. a lot of the services are built on top of these providers. the provider might be cheaper financially, but you then pay in time to build what these services give you out of the box. Vercel, Render and Coolify fit more into the "services" space. Render, for example, ships with a bunch of comparable features like preview environments based off git branching. these services have more abstractions and primitives for you to get going fast. if you want the Vercel experience and you don't already have a bunch of existing infrastructure, i personally think it's better to just use Vercel. some people love AWS (or other providers), have multiple parts of their project(s) there, and want to keep everything in one platform. that can also work. everything is about understanding the trade-offs at a high level. the main point of this post is to be aware that you might be paying a lot more in time than money if you want "the Vercel experience" but think you can build it yourself. it's not trivial work, there's a lot of nuances, and it's likely not going to be nearly as good as what a company valued at $3.25b who has a team of engineers full-time on this are building.
How much are you paying that developer per month? What is their effective hourly rate? How many hours are you going to spend migrating to something other than vercel? $40 a month is actually not that much money in the context of a business where youāre paying people thousands per month for their labour.
So true. If one 150h dev gets distracted or has to fiddle around with anything for even 30 minutes - or the other stakeholders need preview branches - this flips quickly. But Iāve been in situations where I was adding 8+ students to a group project, and I just couldnāt afford it. One of those people might not even contribute that month. I donāt have a solution, but I feel like thereās a pricing model thatās _different_ - and could work for everyone. Iām happy to spend money. But I canāt spend money on barely used āslots.ā
Sure. But I come from a finance background and have a frugal mindset in life and in business. I know there is no way that what I am using vercel for would cost $20/seat anywhere else. The team will grow, that $40 is not a fixed cost. As a young company, I donāt think itās a bad thing to want to save cash anywhere I can.
You didnāt answer their question, though. What is the cost of migrating to another service vs just paying $40? Have you done a CBA, or are you just jumping right into a migration?
Itās not a massive SaaS platform. I understand this could cause it to be more complex. But itās not.
The migration itself could be done in a day, like I said itās mostly static hosting. A few functions. Nothing crazy. Would almost undoubtedly be less monetary consumption to migrate than stay.
"Done in a day" At a rate of 2 devs, $40/hr, 8hr day, that's a $640 jump. What's your actual cost benefit analysis to jumping ship to somewhere else *right now*? Do you anticipate having significant downtime as a result of going to another service that wouldn't happen with Vercel? Such as poor documentation for hosting a Next app on their service. That's ultimately what you need to look at. Not the fact that you're paying $240/year per person. But how much additional costs will come from shopping around.
When I say done in a day, I mean I can do it on my own in a very insignificant amount of time. Iām not on salary, I donāt technically have a ārate.ā Not to say my time is worthless. I donāt think it would take more than a few hours tops, but obviously this varies with whatever platform I choose, which is up in the air hence this post. It took me 10 minutes to deploy to Vercel, so even something slightly more complex, I canāt imagine itāll be much longer.
you come from a finance background but donāt consider opportunity cost?
How can I consider the opportunity cost when I donāt even know what I am moving to? I am not sure when I said I wouldnāt consider the cost. I did, however, say it will vary depending on what I choose. This post is purely fielding ideas.
opportunity cost in this context means cost of your labor
Yes, of course. I mentioned I know my time is not worthless. But building a company is different than working a w2 gig (not that thereās anything wrong with a w2 job, ofc). Lots of different considerations. Iām not trying to sound stubborn. But please read the context of my original post and these replies. I am looking for something that has similar features to vercel, without the ābig startup returning money to VCsā pricing model. Thatās all. Iām not looking for a super complicated solution that would be cheaper but take hours to spin up. In my original post I said ideally I want something that is basically vercel but cheaper. It seems that exists with coolify and a VPS? If it takes me 2 hours to save $240 per year per team member (which, I expect to grow the team by another 3-4 people by December). Thatās significant in the scope of my early business.
Given your income could be made at X company for Y rate, you need to be considering this as a cost factor when making opportunity cost decisions for your business. If you could make $50/hr at some company, then when you spend 3 hours working on something that was a $150 opportunity cost. You can further factor in future income potential multiplied by the probability of successfully reaching that income. Most business owners assume 100% odds of success though, as the more realistic 10% odds is quite defeating. I'll say this though... I tried to deploy a NextJS app as a subdomain to my own website... **it was impossible.** I spent hours and hours trying to make it work, and I could not figure out why it didn't work. The homepage was fine, but trying to go to any further routes it would break. I never figured out why, and there is virtually zero documentation to help. That's the risk you take when deploying somewhere else with Next. It works, until it doesn't. I probably lost in the vicinity of $1,000 in opportunity costs with how long I spent trying to make it work.
I've got a personal website using NextJS 14 that is hosted somewhere other than Vercel. It is a challenge for sure. The biggest consideration is that the people who are hosting the app are also the ones who built the framework. So as you are pointing out, all of the overhead and headache of maintaining Next in relation to your host, is taken care of.. by that host. When something goes wrong with my website my host would just say "lol and?"
If you want to be frugal but ignore that the team costs have to do with security compliance, you could have them share you login information.
I see nothing better than hosting on vps like DigitalOcean. Traefik and docker compose take care of most of the things.
This. I've got a small company myself and changed all my hosting to a single digital ocean droplet. With nginx to resolve the different domains. I deploy via gitlab ci/cd with SSH but you can probably do something similar with github. Because SSL is free with Let's Encrypt it saved me quite some monthly costs. Also if you're running nextjs static sites you can look into gitlab pages. It's free hosting and I use Cloudflair to add my custom domains to it. But if you need server side stuff a Digital ocean droplet is the way to go.
How powerful is your server? I love this in theory- but I feel like I really need to jump a few pricing tiers before I can justify running a bunch of docker containers.
I run a regular 4 GiB 2 vCPUs droplet, which cost $24 a month. I used to pay about $ 12 a month per domain with hosting. So running 3 sites on it would already be saving money. I run way more than those are but mostly either static sites or fairly low computing heavy sites. I think about 15 in total. Which otherwise would have cost my close to 200 a month. But the thing is, most of those websites are projects of mine, client websites all run on their own droplet, but the clients pay for that, the topic was about cutting your own cost and this is a fairly easy way to do that. I actually run a seconds droplet, the cheapest tier, which is my gitlab runner. Handles my docker in docker ci/cd builds without any problem. Makes me think my other droplet could even be cheaper probably.
Will look into it, seems like digital ocean is popular!
Digital Ocean is really easy to host on their App Platform or on a regular Ubuntu droplet. The documentation is really good as well
This pretty much - Iāve used various services and digitalocean is always my go to. I run most of my heavy trafficked apps out of one droplet. I recently tried vercel for another web app that blew up even more and vercel pricing isnāt ideal but not too crazy yet. The new pricing scheme is not good though so Iāll be looking to move
Youāre the reason why the free tier is so good
Yes, free tier is excellent. Vercel is a good product, donāt get me wrong.
Yeah this should be a success story. Instead itās a complaint about charging $40 per person per month, for a company of two people, to host an ENTERPRISE app. Comedic!
Coolify self hosted. Very good. Takes a day to setup but you're fine right after.
AWS via SST
I second this. SST is also not just for deploying nextjs projects in AWS, making it a rather valuable tool to learn.
This is the way
Checkout Cloudflare
Try Coolify, i am hosting 9 next.js apps on my server with it and itās been the most time saving tool i ever tried!
How much traffic or how many users do you have? How much do you spend on servers?
Hi, I run these apps on my VPS with 4vCore, 8 GB RAM, 240 GB NVMe, I spend around ā¬17 / month for this server. This is my VPS for personal projects, currently have 9 Next.js apps and 1 WordPress site. Regarding traffic: itās basically zero since these apps are only stored to showcase my work to new customers if they want to see it. I occasionally update these apps to keep Next.js and other packages up-to-date. The auto-rebuild feature on repo push saves me plenty of time.
I'm using only 40% of ram memory so far, so I still can add plenty of projects here and not care about anything since bandwidth is unmetered too š
I use Railway for most things. Traditional servers not serverless. Spin up a Node.js server and database, connect GitHub for deployments. https://railway.app/template/0csXuv
[https://sst.dev/](https://sst.dev/)
I use Google Cloud Run. Deploying is as easy as on Vercel imho. Just connect your repo and let gcp do the rest
check -Ā [https://coolify.io/](https://coolify.io/)Ā an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative.
Netlify
I recently built my first SAAS product for writers. Initially I deployed it on the Vercel but looking at their pricing at the scale level I moved to the AWS amplify. Ha, it takes time to deploy but it works smoothly. At the start you need to feedle with it for some time but after that it is cool.
you could use aws or google cloud. But just take a minute to think about the time that developer will need to get everything that's included in Vercel to work on there. It'll be a hell of a lot more than 20$ every month if you're not hiring Indians or whatever.
sst if u wanna use aws
Just self host with docker on somewhere like digital ocean, takes an hour or 2 to setup and add GitHub actions to auto build and deploy it
I rented a bare metal server. It costs me $100 a month so definitely more but I run caprover on it and anytime I like I can spool up a droplet or publish right from GitHub and it just works. Currently running like 7 droplets on it that all automatically build from gitlab. So if you have more uses I highly recommend I bet you can find somethin cheaper just depends on your workload needs.
Coolify
Hetzner + Coolify is all you need
I am hosting my site (zvgscout.com) on render.com. In my Option the easiest to setup.
Check dokploy
Aws amplify
Amplify
AWS Amplify. Super annoying to setup but once itās setup it runs like a charm. Cost very little. Auto deployment to Lambda for api
Check out Railway and Adaptable
You might like [https://www.flightcontrol.dev/](https://www.flightcontrol.dev/) ā it's a common next step for Vercel users
AWS Amplify. It has some rough edges but itās getting better with each release.
cloudflare pages, for 20$ you can try this good old heroku too.
I think you could give a try to Cloudflare. It doesnāt have so many features but gets the job done.
Cloudflare Pages can do a considerable amount of the things you were looking for
if you're interested in serverless, checkout SST. Basically makes it really easy to host a next application on AWS serverless functions without having to touch any nasty AWS stuff
Will check it out!
Devs are expensive, 40$ USD a month doesn't sounds that much in comparison , to paying for example ~50$/hour.Ā The Best thing you could do is host it by yourself with a service like coolify and a VPS, you could reduce the hosting to 5$ month in a cheap VPS.
Fly.io is what I went to, definitely the best alternative to Vercel. Very easy to get going too
Digitalocean app platform or netlify
aws amplify ?
I love netlify
Netlify
Self host coolify
Your best bet is AWS. Amplify Gen2 is not perfect but way better than Gen1 and you pretty much only pay for compute. If you start a new account itās practically free for a year depending on your user base. That being said, Vercel still has better Dx.
If you setup Domain, they will charge for Route53 usage. I think it is hardly a dollar a month.