frontend cloud

Vercel

Vercel is a deployment platform built around the frontend framework it created. This profile covers what it does, how it is priced, and where it stops being the right choice.

What the product actually does

Vercel began as the company behind Next.js and became the place Next.js applications are expected to run. The platform takes a repository, builds it, and serves it from an edge network with per-route caching, preview deployments for every branch, and image optimisation built in.

The architecture is serverless by default. A page that needs to run code on the server does so in a function that starts on demand, which means no container to keep warm and no capacity to size. The trade is that the function has a cold start and a maximum duration, and applications that assume a long-lived process do not fit.

How pricing works once you are inside

Seats are free on the hobby tier and the paid tiers price on seats plus a set of metered resources: bandwidth, function invocations, function duration and image transformations. The metered side is where a surprise lives, because a page with many images and a high cache-miss rate consumes bandwidth and transformations faster than a text site consumes anything.

The specific mechanic worth modelling before committing is that every deployment creates a new immutable build. Preview deployments for branches are a genuine feature and they are also billable resources, so a team that opens forty pull requests a week is running forty extra deployments whether or not anyone looks at them.

Where it breaks down

Anything that wants a persistent process — a websocket server, a background worker, a queue consumer — is outside the model. Vercel has added long-running functions and cron, but they are edges of the product rather than the centre, and a system built around them will feel like it is fighting the platform.

The other limit is framework gravity. Vercel is at its best with Next.js and merely competent with everything else. Teams running a different framework pay the platform's assumptions without collecting its benefits.

What switching costs

Low for a static site — the output is files. High for anything using the platform's own primitives: edge middleware, incremental static regeneration, image optimisation and the preview-deployment workflow all have to be rebuilt or abandoned.

Sources

Vercel public documentation and pricing page, read October 2026.