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Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

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Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it just serving static content and the content fitting in RAM? If so your laptop can serve it just fine even.

A laptop would have a hard time serve thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day.

It shouldn't. The issue is that most developers would rather spin up another instance of their server than solve the performance issue in their code, so now it's a common belief that computers are really slow to serve content.

And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#52
post #39
post #12

1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in. 2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platf…

$50k and €30 are of the same order of magnitude.

This is offtopic honestly, but I'm curious if I've been using this phrase wrong for my whole life. Doesn't "order of magnitude" refer to steps of powers of ten?

$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#54
post #12

1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in. 2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platf…

2nd point resonates with me, how come he wants to cover expenses, while being connected to Israeli PM and Epstein is connected to Israel through Ehud Barak.

Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#55
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think a $30 hetzner host can sustain that level of traffic performantly? Don't get me wrong, I love hetzner, but I would be very surprised if the numbers work out there.

No . Hetzner would terminate your server as you are not a profitable customer.

A profitable customer? How would Hetzner know if you're profitable or not?

I've hosted side projects on Hetzner for years and have never experienced anything like that. Do you have any references of projects to which it happened?

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#56
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think a $30 hetzner host can sustain that level of traffic performantly? Don't get me wrong, I love hetzner, but I would be very surprised if the numbers work out there.

No . Hetzner would terminate your server as you are not a profitable customer.

I have heard of hetzner terminating customer relationships if too many legal complaints are filed against your VPSes.

But not because of being "not a profitable customer". Mind sharing some links here?

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"In 2025, global anti-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrations intensified, with ACLED recording more than 49,000 protests across 133 countries. Public sentiment shifted significantly, particularly following Israel's interception of a humanitarian flotilla in October 2025. Largest Global Mobilisations Bangladesh: On 12 April 2025, Dhaka hosted what was described as the largest pro-Palestine protest in history, with an…

Those are all very small numbers in the context of the actual electorates, and supports the claim that it is the same small group of activists obsessed over Israel, and not a widespread “community” concern.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#59

What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress. edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflar…

Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#60
post #18
post #4

in other words, "we know our product is overpriced as hell, so i will pay for it to avoid further exposure of our pricing model".

this seems like an unreasonably unchartiable reading of a relatively chill and nice situation

I'm not sure I would describe the discourse around Vercel and its CEO as "relatively chill and nice". Things are perceived in context.
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