Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 208 posts

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#171

Post by chrisweekly »

benatkin wrote: post #162
chrisweekly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more precise: Vercel is the company (fka "Zeit"). They have a suite of complementary software products and services, including NextJS (a "batteries included" React framework with robust support for SSR and SSG), Now (hosting / CDN / runtime in "serverless" paradigm), Micro, etc. World-class DX and remarkably powerful tools that somehow combine simplicity and flexibility. No affiliation, just a longtime grateful…

Vercel is the company and the product. Now is the old name of the product. It's been thoroughly re-branded. If you go to now.sh it redirects to a page on vercel.com with no mention of "now". The command-line tool is "vercel", aliased to "vc", and it is configured in vercel.json (no longer now.json). If you go to GitHub and look at the repos containing with "now" in their name, they're archived or deprecated.

Thanks, quite right. (I realized same too late to edit my comment.)

FWIW I liked "Zeit" better than "Vercel" (shrug). But preferences aside, I was annoyed that the new redirects for "now.sh" URLs were -- uncharacteristically for a team famous for attention to detail -- mishandled, e.g. breaking a fantastic preso I'd bookmarked (which grauch used in his React Conf 2017 talks) and which I had cause to reference today in promoting NextJS with a client. It's the only real "footgun" move I've seen them make. Here's hoping it's an anomaly!

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#172

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81
caust1c wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about being in the S&P 500? It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else.

> It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else If trillions of tracking dollars with a measurable boost on valuation and trading [1] and thus a measurable reduction in the cost of capital [2] is “nothing else,” then yes. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138641810... [2] https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/130246

[deleted]

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#173

Post by aloukissas »

akuji1993 wrote: post #31
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #21

Many congrats Vercel! I've been a big fan since Zeit platform version 1 - I remember the transition to platform version 2 was difficult but over time I can see how incredible of a platform you've become. Just a note from a fan - I hope you all can determine a way to approach the future with longevity and corporate independence. The web really needs your entire teams dedication towards performance, end user experience…

> avoid being acquired Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.

MSFT/GitHub would be an epic acquisitor for Vercel.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#174

Post by jeffshek »

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…

It's a common startup strategy to have free plans that lock in initial customers and then raise prices later and/or remove the free plans.

At that point, you're using customer growth as your primary metric to investors and thus raising money.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#175

Post by nfRfqX5n »

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…

enterprise support

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#176

Post by eyelidlessness »

adim86 wrote: post #9

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

It’s several things that package well together, plus some payable value add for certain use cases.

- they develop Next.js which is one of the two primary React-based solutions for static/server/client rendered websites (the other being Gatsby)

- they provide low friction deployment solutions for same (like heroku)

- they provide tools for specific markets attracted to one or both of the above, e.g. ecommerce

- probably a fair bit more, but those are their standout offerings

Worth noting that Next.js is a mix of custom offerings (they have their own solutions for things like static site generation and image optimization) and configurations for existing tools (a lot of what works well is a predefined set of Babel and Webpack configs, but they can be overridden unlike create-react-app, and there’s broad support for that).

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#177

Post by eyelidlessness »

maelito wrote: post #35
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…

React is just one lib used by Vercel

I’m using Preact X on a Next project and honestly it was more pain than I expected. Their Preact support is pinned to older versions with a different module structure.

I’ll be releasing my solution as a config wrapper (or offer as a PR for their Preact example) before I launch my site so other folks don’t need to go through the same process.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#178

Post by yawnxyz »

liminal wrote: post #88

I'm trying to decipher what this is. So far I've learned there's a thing called "Jamstack" that seems to be about static websites. How does one manage databases with this technology?

I run a super small site, so all the data is compiled at build time into JSON files and served using serverless/lambda (e.g. short server-side functions). The data I'm getting from Notion and Airtable, so I don't have to run a "real" DB.

For commenting I'm experimenting with services like Fauna and Supabase

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#179

Post by yawnxyz »

flyinglizard wrote: post #17

From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic. We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores. [1] https://littleast…

wow that's so awesome, if I had kids I'd totally buy something haha

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#180

Post by yawnxyz »

chrshawkes wrote: post #34

No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.

I'm a designer w/ some developer experience that uses Vercel for our startup... I'd have no clue how to deploy my own server. And Digital Ocean costs money... Vercel is free for me right now
Post reply on HN