Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#1

Post by lumos » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 7:51 PM UTC

Vercel charges low/mid five figures for their enterprise plans, which essentially comes with higher usage limits, some security features like SSO and IP blocking, and an uptime and support SLA. This hardly seems worth the additional cost?

It seems like they need a much better solution somewhere in the mid-tier--Vercel is great to get started on projects, but if you basically need to go from small project to 5 figure bill without much in between, it hardly seems to make sense to use for a project that is going to scale.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#2

Post by solidehue » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 7:54 PM UTC

What extras do you need from Vercel when deploying a basic react app? In theory all you need is an html hosting service if you don’t use any of the fancy react featured…

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#3

Post by seatownhack » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 8:02 PM UTC

You can definitely find cheaper options like render, but render is definitely not worth it. Frequent outages and super slim feature set.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#4

Post by rbnsl » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 8:26 PM UTC

Yeah it really feels like once your hobby project actually starts making some money, they start charging you insane amounts to compensate the millions of other hobby projects they host that haven’t made a dime yet…

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#5

Post by joshxyz » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 4:31 AM UTC

nextjs and vercel is fucking cancer.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#6

Post by jfoster » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 10:28 AM UTC

Is it expensive or genius? Ultimately, enterprise businesses can definitely afford that, so it's just down to how Vercel can differentiate between them and non-enterprise.

Higher usage can be purchased separately from Enterprise, not as cheap as the initial plan, but far from 5-figures: https://vercel.com/docs/limits/overview#additional-resources

So really we're mostly talking about SLAs. I think "we absolutely need an SLA" seems a decent way to differentiate between small businesses and enterprise businesses.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#7

Post by leros » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

I don't know about Vercel explicitly, but enterprise plans are usually more than just larger quotas. You get access to solutions engineers that will help you solve problems. You get higher uptime guarantees. You get SLAs like 24 or 48 hours for bug fixes that impact you. You get access to a phone support line where someone picks up immediately. Lots of stuff that reduces risk for your business and your customers. As a business, you can only offer SLAs to your customers that are as strong as the SLAs of your hosting service, so that becomes important once you get into the enterprise world.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#8

Post by moomoo11 » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

It’s a VC fueled project around something you can set up in a few hours if you took a few hours to learn. Imo.

But for large companies making millions or billions it’s a convenience that saves engineering costs.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#9

Post by lumos » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

leros wrote: post #7

I don't know about Vercel explicitly, but enterprise plans are usually more than just larger quotas. You get access to solutions engineers that will help you solve problems. You get higher uptime guarantees. You get SLAs like 24 or 48 hours for bug fixes that impact you. You get access to a phone support line where someone picks up immediately. Lots of stuff that reduces risk for your business and your customers. As…

I guess I should rephrase, a true enterprise plan may make sense to cost that much. I think the gap for Vercel seems to be in the in-between stage. They have plans that are super cheap or free for small hobby projects, and the expensive enterprise plan. Not much in between for when you're growing.

The other dilemma for them seems to be in capturing true enterprise customers...if you have those resources, you might just decide to build out your own dev ops/infra team instead of paying big markups on AWS/Cloudflare bills.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Vercel so expensive?

#10

Post by leros » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

lumos wrote: post #9

leros wrote: post #7

I don't know about Vercel explicitly, but enterprise plans are usually more than just larger quotas. You get access to solutions engineers that will help you solve problems. You get higher uptime guarantees. You get SLAs like 24 or 48 hours for bug fixes that impact you. You get access to a phone support line where someone picks up immediately. Lots of stuff that reduces risk for your business and your customers. As…

I guess I should rephrase, a true enterprise plan may make sense to cost that much. I think the gap for Vercel seems to be in the in-between stage. They have plans that are super cheap or free for small hobby projects, and the expensive enterprise plan. Not much in between for when you're growing. The other dilemma for them seems to be in capturing true enterprise customers...if you have those resources, you might ju…

To your first point, I think you have to start valuing your time when analyzing the cost. If you have a small growing SaaS, is spending $100-200/mo for hosting really a big deal? Think about the cost of your time. I will gladly pay that kind of hosting cost to not have to spend time doing devops on my small product. I'd rather spend that time on feature development or marketing.

I think your second point is debatable. We used to spend something like $50-100k a year on Heroku which is technically way overpriced, but hiring even a single devops person to move us to AWS would have been much more expensive and introduced all sorts of risk. I think a medium sized company is fine paying $100-300k to something like Heroku as long as the offerings are fitting the architectural needs. And Heroku is AWS so you can always use some AWS services alongside your Heroku stuff.