Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
vercel.com
vercel.com
Fool me once...
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based redirects.
Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part, I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens.
To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and netlify's model is severely limited.
For a CMS, I'd have to again go for a subscription model.
Data and APIs are also another issue. There is no way to use something like Strapi since that needs to have a real DB behind it.
Now, to orchestrate the users for role-base redirects, oauth, payment gateaway data and everything else... I've no idea where to even start.
I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this is a dumb question.
It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem for you without much work. And it solves other problems too, like managing users and tracking revision history for every piece of content.
I think Digital Ocean has a one click setup for WordPress. WP isn't my favorite software to work with as a developer, but I use it when it's the right took for the job because for the most part, I've been able to deploy it and forget about it because it has just kept chugging along and getting the job done without any intervention from me.
Wordpress is a dumpster fire and I hate it with a passion, though. Like, viscerally, almost as much as I dislike Drupal and Joomla. I'd use the term PTSD but that strikes me as insensitive.
But I still use it for many clients, because it's the simplest, easiest solution that other (and crucially, cheap!) developers can take over when I'm not there anymore.
If you’re at a company that wants to manage K8s, and you’ve chosen to invest in that direction, then serverless doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If your customers aren’t buying compute, then you should be wary of large investments that are outside your core focus.
Sure, there are quite a few problems with lambdas. But the abstraction you’re working at is much more atomic. And you don’t need FTEs to manage K8s and introduce a completely new set of problems.
Less is more (is the argument).
I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises they don't have to think about it. For those of us comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But for people who just have some code they want to run, getting it usefully deployed is still too hard.
Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we consolidate around.
I like to think of the builder options put in the `now.json` file as I would a webpack config.
I had to pull data from Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest on a schedule - once an hour. The pipeline took about 3 minutes to run. I used a CloudEvent cron to kick it off, a few lambdas, stored the raw data in S3, had another lambda massage that data, stored the final data into S3, and put a message into SQS letting my OLTP system know that it could bring it in.
Worked great. Were there other ways to build it? Sure. Could have done it on the same hosts that my OLTP system was running on. But the amount of memory it used for that 3 minutes doubled the amount that was needed on the host normally. Yes I could have optimized it. But my time was better spent figuring out other issues (I was sole developer on the project). So I just broke it into a bunch of different parts and kicked up to Lambda. Worked great. Never had any issues with it. Never worried about not having resources. I think it cost .2 to .8 USD each run? So ~600 USD a month at the high end. And it took me less than a day to break it up and get it running vs who knows how long to optimize.
So it definitely solved a problem I had in a very efficient way, and allowed me to speed it up just by spending money.
Only if your chosen vendor designed for that lock-in. Google Cloud Run is serverless that just runs whatever container serving HTTP you throw at it, no "lambda functions" needed.
Ultimately we went another way but it is a solid project.
Ok, I get that serverless is a different paradigm. And I understand the arguments for it. But I refused to use Now v2 precisely because they violated their promises they had made -- but worse, turned it into "just another AWS". If I want serverless, I'll use AWS because frankly Zeit/Vercel's visibility into what is going on is just abysmal. And FWIW we now have several projects running on serverless -- using Next.js -- on AWS. Using the severless component, it requires NO special considerations and could easily be redeployed on a standard server in minutes. No vendor lock in, funny how that worked out? I expected to be locked in on AWS serverless. That didn't happen.
The icing on the cake was when they didn't officially deprecate v1, but made it so unstable, so unusable, that I got to the point of spending DAYS per week deploying and redeploying and redeploying our docker containers because their servers would randomly decide that the hosting server no longer had a network connection. If I see E_AGAIN one more time I'm going to spit.
And then they upped the price from $20/mo that we were paying for 4 containers, to $150. Thanks guys.
It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I spent a day, redid everything to deploy on AWS EB, and haven't looked back since. That was the LEAST amount of time I'd spent on that, in a given week, for about a 4 month period prior. To be fair, the guy running Zeit/Vercel's support is pretty solid. He did try to be helpful.
My experience with the technical leadership has been left lacking. We tried several times to contribute to Next.js and were treated like idiot children because how dare we trample on their kingdom. If you're not a tech bro, stay in your lane!
Look I'm just sharing my experience over there. It has been roundly negative. I'm sure others can come with anecdotes of it being roundly positive, good for you. Mine is just another anecdote but it's the only insight I have.
Although, the 1500+ comment thread on Spectrum when they announced v2 strongly suggests I'm not alone.
If this is just another choice that's good. Perhaps it's faster? I've deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but not much different than netlify's build that works with a git push. Either way, congrats on the funding!
Disclaimer: I don't work for netlify, though I did interview with them awhile back.
So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can only really use the static site generation features of NextJS, whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API functions.
Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-nod... or Python https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-pyt...
I guess the difference with Zeit is in the routing?
For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!
Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.
We're having issues with zoom...
We're having issues with chrome...
We're having issues with word...
I absolutely loved the name "Zeit", although I've read in this thread that it could have branding/SEO issues. I'm hoping Vercel will grow on me – right now, it sounds like a combination of "incel", "Verizon", and maybe some kind of geriatric medicine.
Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.”
Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.
Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
To expand in to a market that already has a well known company by that name
Hard to rank for it for search purposes
Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out of
To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just some letters.)
I will say that it's easy to say that none of this stuff matters at all. And it's very hard to quantify among a zillion other variables. Is it crucial in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. But things like brand awareness and brand perception can matter--at least at the margins.
To be clear, my sentence was slightly syntactically incorrect: what I meant was, "Google is a stupid- and juvenile-sounding name." It's not a stupid name, but it is stupid-sounding, at least until you get used to it. But it's far from a stupid name. For instance: it's spelled the way it sounds, it's memorable, and it sounds like a verb. Those are all pluses, and yes, they matter.
I once worked for a company called Internet Enterprises. Terrible name. It sounds like a shell company with dusty offices on a service road off a highway.
I once owned a design agency called factor[e] design initiative (I didn't found it or name it). Poor brand story: the "e" was chosen because at the time (late 90s) "e" was like "i" from a few years ago. No other good reason. It was spelled all lower-case, like e. e. cummings (annoying for a company). It had weird punctuation marks in it. And how do you pronounce it? I would commonly hear "factory" or "factor-E" (correct). I used to joke it was "fac-TOR-ay" (say that with an Italian accent).
A few years in, we rebranded to Parallel. Much better: regular spelling and capitalization, dictionary word and a good brand story (alignment / working "in parallel" with clients, etc.) At times, in conversations with clients, they would inadvertently use the brand: "We'd like to work in parallel with you..."
This stuff matters—a lot! It's easier to attract customers and employees with a great brand. And the brand provides a consistent touch point - a "north star" if you will - for what the company stands for.
This is what I figure. That or they want people to forget about lousy things they've done. Dunno if it was ever true, but hearing the rumour that Kentucky fried chicken switched to KFC to avoid being associated with fried chicken and the health issues surrounding trans fats that were a big deal at the time sort of stuck with me.
Personally, I'd trust the company that's kept the same boring name for a decade over one that's renamed themselves several times in the same period.
For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in English - but actually fits for this rebranding :-) ).
When "Open BC" (Germany's LinkedIn, BC stands for Business Club) renamed itself to "Xing" 14 years ago, it felt really weird to me. Though I think by now most people on the Xing platform won't even remember the old name. And in 5 years time, people who weren't even born when it was rebranded will start joining the platform.
"As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business."
Biased which way, did you think it was good or bad?
Tried Netlify and it worked without any changes to my code. The Zeit UI might be slicker, but it definitely isn't easier to use imo.
I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.
Good to see free personal plan tho.
Here is their front page copy:
"Develop. Preview. Ship. Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams. All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN."
This doesn't really say a whole lot.
Then we have these little bits:
"Zero config Works out of the box with any web framework."
Great, but what is it, and what does it do?
"instant static deploys Push to Git and your website is live. Zero configuration required."
So this is starting to make some sense - does this mean this technology will grab my github changes to push specific files to where I've hosted them? They ask me to 'import a project' and yet I have idea what that means.
Here is the 'intro' in docs: [1]
"Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration."
That explains next to nothing.
Terminology like 'Jamstack' is still very new and niche, I suggest outside of certain bubbles, very few people understand what that means, so the site is using language that is foreign to most readers. This is not going to work very well.
...
It would be nice to think I'm a little slow, but I don't think I am - I think a large portion of today's marketing and communications is a little rubbish: it fails to explain within any reasonable detail 'what it is, what it does, why I would want it' and provide ultra-basic 'hello world' examples that explain the nature of the system.
This is a problem.
There are new techs released every day, I'm tired of struggling through weird non-explanations of various platforms just to get the basic idea of even what it does, this is something companies should focus on.
> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
\shrug\
ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.
Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.
This is a big backing for Next.
However rebranding to Vercel is bad.
[1] https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz
I thought about making "higher level" frameworks by combining "lower level" frameworks myself.
How did you do it? I mean, it's not just wrapping the libraries, but also the CLIs.
One suggestion - I highly recommend you mention that you're leveraging nextjs. There is a certain buy-in that nextjs has that would be hard elsewhere.
In fact I would say that I would totally pay an annual subscription for this (even on "starter marketplaces" like themeforest).
[1]: https://kretes.dev/
The data access layer in JS leaves a lot to be desired (especially compared to Rails)
React almost felt like a winner for single page apps, but there was never a great "flux" pattern to use, and now they've completely ruined that ecosystem with Hooks.
Also SPA's have become so big and bloated it's time to go back to something that you can build progressive web apps with like jQuery.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.
But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.
The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though.
My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...
And it's listed in their support docs here... https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes
They wrote about it on their blog: https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-f...
> [1] ...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution
Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions.
Replacing zeit makes sense, not sure the chosen replacement was any good.
Is this satire? Can’t tell.
> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".
If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)
(For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)
Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?
They started as serverless docker and changed to CDN + edge cloud functions to specialized hosting for front end projects.
I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.
Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:
> The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.
I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.
The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4].
I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.
Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty.
---
references
0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376
1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe...
2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do...
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh...
4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816
Except that they built their brand off the backs of people they no longer want using their platform...
It's a big market for most internationally operating companies, seems a smart move to take that into account early.
> Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English
And it caused them pretty big problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
I'm sure they've thoroughly vetted "Vercel" against potential trademark conflicts.