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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#151

Post by seveibar »

texasbigdata wrote: post #50
seveibar wrote: post #12

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependen…

Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.

It's from a bygone era when Vercel would charge for serverless invocations. I think it still might be possible to run into the problem in overage so I can describe it a bit.

Basically I was polling an API endpoint on our SPA client. Maybe one hit every second. We were getting over 10,000 (non-signup) users a day, so it ended up being a lot of requests. Our functions were configured with the default amount of RAM and CPU allocation. When I saw the bill shoot up, I reduced the rate of polling and adjusted the serverless functions to have a lower amount of RAM. This got the price down to $50/mo. Later, Vercel would make pricing per developer seat so the price dropped even more.

The traffic dropped to more reasonable levels after that. But it was a very good week and the traffic remained nominally 2x-5x. I'm sure google's algorithm played some part in the traffic spike.

(also, I am not an employee of Vercel, just a customer :)

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#152

Post by seveibar »

vijaybritto wrote: post #97
seveibar wrote: post #12

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependen…

Can you please explain a bit more? This sounds very interesting and it might teach things that we don't know about vercel.

I explained it a bit above :) generally Vercel works really well for high-traffic sites without worrying about auto-scaling. But you'll run into unique issues whenever you're dealing with two many digits haha

I think my problems were always more pronounced with Kubernetes fwiw :)

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#153

Post by reaktivo »

leerob wrote: post #139
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a "transition". They straight up killed features that would never work on 2, that worked on 1. For example, websockets. Turns out you can't do those in their ephemeral lambda model.

There are a variety of solutions for realtime w/ serverless: https://vercel.com/docs/solutions/realtime

All the proposed solutions required a third party service or am I reading it wrong?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#154

Post by duhi88 »

laczi wrote: post #114

NextJS is awesome, but vercel as a business still doesn't seem to make sense to me. There is a free tier and then pricing starts at $20/user/month. For unlimited usage in deploying and consuming static/generated/rendered content and APIs. iiuc, vercel runs on aws. Isn't the math fundamentally flawed on this kind of a business model if it isn't backed by owning the compute/network substrate first? Egress charges would…

I feels like Heroku 8 years ago. Cheap to get started, but I never recommended it for startups with a tight budget. You can get stuck with an architecture that becomes very expensive very quickly, and that scares me.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#155

Post by dang »

cubicmeter wrote: post #130
4778468d wrote: post #59

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

if you look at the profile picture of the guy writing it it will all make sense https://twitter.com/rauchg

No personal attacks on HN please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#156

Post by conductr »

robertoandred wrote: post #144
4778468d wrote: post #59

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

So you read two sentences, but not the rest of the page? They explain everything pretty clearly.

To be fair, I eventually got there (I think) but I don’t use Next.js and the banner of “building the next web” threw me off. It’s essentially web hosting, maybe on the PAAS end of the spectrum like Heroku. Seems like they turned up the collaboration dial, which gives them an entry point to team sales. That’s the best I could tell.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#158

Post by tomlin »

texasbigdata wrote: post #126
ketamine__ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he?

Based on his HN linked Twitter and his LinkedIn from googling his name, that does not appear to be the case at all. Not sure why someone would lob an accusation like that.

Because it's verifiably true, all you have to do is know it in your heart.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#159

Post by IggleSniggle »

NationalPark wrote: post #137
vijaybritto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumption that any developer might automatically navigate to documentation page sounds silly. This is not true. Developers glance the page like normal people do and the OP's concerns are not wrong.

I would! I also like to look at the job openings page when evaluating a technical product. The experience they ask for can give a lot of insight into internal engineering health.

Haha I do this too but stop telling everyone about this one weird trick or our secret will be out!

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#160

Post by wdb »

chrisweekly wrote: post #76
CyberRabbi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same question. I’m an experienced developer and I could not figure out the substance of what this product offers from a glance at its front page. It vaguely seemed like a replacement for react but it’s hard to believe you could raise $40M for that so something else must be going on. I generally was under the impression that the industry was moving away from client side rendering since it’s so slow. At least…

One of the major selling points of NextJS is precisely to address the issues with CSR (client-side rendering). It offers SSG (static site generation) for build-time rendering -- no client JS required. But also SSR (server-side rendering, ie at runtime), and automatic hydration for CSR too.

I just wished it wouldn't need all this __NEXT stuff which appears to lists all the possible routes/files.
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