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Vercel Service Markup

service-markup.vercel.app

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Re: Vercel Service Markup

#91

Post by mhoad »

reducesuffering wrote: post #36
msy wrote: post #24

Vercel raised $300m+ at the top of the market and paid over the odds to hire a ton of JS ecosystem luminaries. Those investors are going want to see a return, not just an eyewatering wage bill. Anyone building on top of their ecosystem is going to get fleeced, they have no other route to possibly justifing their valuation or ever providing a passable return on that capital. Everyone else should be preparing their pla…

Letting Vercel handle developing half your infra for you. Expensive. Paying twice the $300k engineers to develop your VC scale app in 2023 using HTML templates or Create React App. Priceless

It’s really not an either / or scenario at all.

There are tons of really good solutions to this problem that are incredibly affordable but they just aren’t popular in the React ecosystem which is once again off doing its own thing seemingly detached from everyone else and trying to just fit the React mental model into any abstraction they come across and patting themselves on the back about innovation in the process.

Honestly React is an actively terrible place to have as your center of the universe when trying to build the kind of app you described. Not to say you can’t or shouldn’t use it but it most certainly shouldn’t be where the core is.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#92

Post by dijit »

re-thc wrote: post #25
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got a lot of dumb little things living out on the internet deployed this way, and I don’t think I’ve ever been compromised. Maybe you were just especially unlucky? There are some things I’ve deployed without much care and yet they’re always as I left them. I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about. I’m just not sure it’s all that difficult with some rudimentary (but sane) security practices.

It is a common theme. Bots and others scan ports and IP ranges all the time. Looking at server logs I always see random server connections trying to get to things like wp-login.php to look for an exploit. If you put it out there and don't actively secure it it's bound to get compromised - just a matter of when.

Maybe I'm blind to something because I've been in server administration for 15years; but my -really old- IRC network requires about 3 hours of maintenance a year; I have 10 machines and they're constantly being "attacked" (as per logs) but the only time I've ever been compromised was when I was trying to overcomplicate things with fancy tools to make administration easier

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#93

Post by re-thc »

dijit wrote: post #92
re-thc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a common theme. Bots and others scan ports and IP ranges all the time. Looking at server logs I always see random server connections trying to get to things like wp-login.php to look for an exploit. If you put it out there and don't actively secure it it's bound to get compromised - just a matter of when.

Maybe I'm blind to something because I've been in server administration for 15years; but my -really old- IRC network requires about 3 hours of maintenance a year; I have 10 machines and they're constantly being "attacked" (as per logs) but the only time I've ever been compromised was when I was trying to overcomplicate things with fancy tools to make administration easier

That's like saying it's outrageous that a consultant charges $xxxxx for a 5minute fix. You've said it - you've got 15years of experience in server administration. That's what people are paying for.

Having said that I never said it was "hard" - just something needs to be done. I responded to a comment that took it for granted that you'd automatically be safe on the Internet.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#94

Post by dijit »

re-thc wrote: post #93
dijit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm blind to something because I've been in server administration for 15years; but my -really old- IRC network requires about 3 hours of maintenance a year; I have 10 machines and they're constantly being "attacked" (as per logs) but the only time I've ever been compromised was when I was trying to overcomplicate things with fancy tools to make administration easier

That's like saying it's outrageous that a consultant charges $xxxxx for a 5minute fix. You've said it - you've got 15years of experience in server administration. That's what people are paying for. Having said that I never said it was "hard" - just something needs to be done. I responded to a comment that took it for granted that you'd automatically be safe on the Internet.

Yeah, but most adminsys people are autodidacts; thus there was a time when they did not have 15 years experience and were running systems on the internet.

I'm not saying there can't be a problem, but it's so easy and the alternatives (cloud+terraform+ansible+packer et al.) are so complicated in comparison that it beggars belief that people are choosing an "easy" path here.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#96

Post by TheFragenTaken »

jrudolph wrote: post #38

The appeal of a no-ops workflow for basic frontend apps is there. We’ve got a bunch of static docs sites built with vuepress and docusaurus that are a great fit for this. Not that we can’t whip up a CDN with terraform and a CI/CD pipeline with preview environments, but my team would rather spend its energy on our core product. However we’ve been badly burned by vercel, netlify and render.com switching their pricing m…

It's obviously a trade off. But we've been running a GitHub Action/Gitlab Job/pick-your-poison task, to just dump build output on an FTP server. It's just static websites, and it has never broken.

In my mind, this is so basic, that anyone (who is a developer), should be able to do it. But that's just my take.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#97

Post by Trystanr »

zamnos wrote: post #61
dmw_ng wrote: post #10

A while back I tried to reproduce a Vercel enterprise invoice using logs generated by an external service. After multiple round-trips with their support team I concluded it is actually impossible to verify what was billed even remotely reflected actual usage. It's essentially an AWS reseller in the form of a random number generator attached to some horrific contemporary JS, that the brand is so popular speaks more to…

Is it their random number generator or are the reselling that off AWS as well? Because have you tried to navigate AWS billing?

Have you tried to navigate AWS in general? Boggles my mind that they have built so much infrastructure on top of what is a truly awful UI.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#98

Post by CharlesW »

paxys wrote: post #70
CharlesW wrote: post #27

This is really interesting, kudos to the creator! My only note is that Vercel is probably paying less than you and me, in which case the spread is a bit greater than the "vs. retail" comparison. As I type this the responses are mostly negative, so to balance that I'd like to point out that (1) integration is often undervalued, and (2) nothing prevents developers from using the other services directly, or even creatin…

The point isn't to care about what Vercel is paying but what you the end user are paying/saving when using the two services being compared.

My point is that Vercel's markup is higher than what's listed if Vercel is paying less than retail. As a specific example, if Vercel is paying Neon 10¢/GB/month for storage, Vercel's markup vs. their costs is 200% instead of 150%.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#99

Post by re-thc »

orliesaurus wrote: post #12

Serious question: do big companies actually use Vercel? I never worked at a big/very big company but I don't see how these prices would scale for them

What do you use it for?

Larger companies already have their workflow, compliance etc.

Developer productivity alone is not going to be worth going through audits / signoffs. It doesn't add enough to the product itself e.g. does it beat Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, etc in that space? No.

Re: Vercel Service Markup

#100

Post by _fat_santa »

Trystanr wrote: post #97
zamnos wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it their random number generator or are the reselling that off AWS as well? Because have you tried to navigate AWS billing?

Have you tried to navigate AWS in general? Boggles my mind that they have built so much infrastructure on top of what is a truly awful UI.

I feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome because I really don't mind it, through granted I've now spent just about every day of the past year staring at a various AWS dashboard.

Overall I think AWS is one of the greatest products to ever come about in my lifetime, though I think one of their greatest fumbles is not getting AWS Amplified more right, they could have squashed both Vercel, Netlify and most other "resellers" like a bug.

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