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Comment by leerob | Hacker News Reader

Lee from Vercel here. Happy to answer any questions about Vercel and our plans for this new round of funding.

Hi Lee, any plans to remove the restriction from the Hobby plan that disallows any sites transacting any sort of commerce? To my knowledge, Cloudflare Pages and Netlify don't have this restriction.

Any plans to add IPv6 support? I see that you use the 76.76.21.21 as a vanity IPv4 address surely you can do the same IPv6 as well.

This is the main reason I refer clients to Netlify as I use IPv6 support to measure the maturity of a platform and its engineers.

Why would you use this as a metric?

Working for AWS and working with hundreds of customers a whopping 0 of them ever required ipv6.

How do you feel about GCP?

Hello Lee, congrats and thanks for taking questions.

In advance I'll apologize for being this direct, answers can get fishy sometimes these days, so I will parameterize my query, so to speak:

What portion (concrete numbers) are at minimum being earmarked for supporting open source projects and devs directly? I don't mean t-shirt budget and things, I mean what is the total amount of funds that will be donated directly to open source projects and devs?

Happy to clarify, but hard to give exact numbers. First, Next.js – we invest into our core team and also growing that community (events, supporting creators, etc). It's a major investment for us. Then, we have a bunch of other open-source libraries and frameworks that we support, like SWR, SWC, webpack, and friends. We also sponsor and support frontend frameworks like Nuxt, Astro, Svelte, etc (through OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors) as well as giving free Vercel accounts to teams like tailwindcss.com! Finally, we hired Rich Harris (creator of Svelte) to work on Svelte full-time and grow that open-source community.

Thank you for the response; should we interpret this as there will be minimal transactions in the form of direct donations of currency to open source projects and developers? I hope this isn't taken as you being grilled, I just had a specific question that I don't feel has yet been answered.

We do direct donations to open source projects through OpenCollective, GitHub Sponsors, and more.

This is the response I was looking for, thank you.

Just curious, if you already have NextJS, why support other frameworks like Svelte, Nuxt etc? Aren't they competitors in a way? Or is it more that Vercel is a platform that can host any framework so as long as customers use Vercel versus others, you don't really care which framework they use?

Any plans introducing better and more transparent growth usage plans in between Pro and Enterprise? We have been faced with surprising charges that weren't clearly defined besides 'fair usage' policy.

Thanks Lee.

So what are your plans for this funding? I know that Vercel just raised $100M a few months ago (it seems).

We're using the funding to:

- Support open-source projects

- Make the Web Edge-first

- Build the end-to-end development platform

- Grow our team

Happy to dive further into any of these. We did raise our Series C in June: https://vercel.com/blog/series-c-102m-continue-building-the-....

Vercel is great! Any plans to have some kind of DB or object storage?

What do you mean by edge first?

We believe the future of the frontend is "at the edge"[1], meaning it's as close to your customers as physically possible. The only way to beat the speed of light is to be closer[2]. Frameworks and tooling should be designed with this constraint from the start[3].

[1] https://vercel.com/edge

[2] https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-application...

[3] https://vercel.com/features/infrastructure

My out of ass opinion. This edge stuff could be nice if only there was some good DB that utilised this model. Then we could have simple to write/work web apps competitive with mobile (if only Safari supported preload)

Planet Scale is probably the closest to what you're describing here.

https://planetscale.com/

They gave CDN a new name to milk venture capitalists.

To me, the difference between a CDN and an Edge Network is that the former is for hosting static assets, where as the latter is for both storage _and_ code execution.

The three major CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly) all support code execution at the edge, and all have (or will have) storage at the edge too

There's also a real question of whether Vercel and Netlify are really at the edge when they’re mainly running in AWS, GCP etc data centers rather than deploying their own hardware at edge locations, ISPs etc.

Don't get me wrong I think Vercel and Netlify are interesting but they seem to talk about being ‘on the edge’ while they really aren’t ATM

Shhh the vcs might hear ya haha

Why did you jump the question above this asking for concrete numbers on open source support? I’m interested in this as well

I answered :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29318420

As noted in reply to that comment you skipped the part that is really the meat of the question.

We do direct donations to open source projects through OpenCollective, GitHub Sponsors, and more. Sorry that wasn't more clear!

How can you possibly make the entire Web edge first? Would a precondition not be to capture all of the web traffic through Vercel first?

Is Vercel a Netlify alternative mainly focused on React? I've been using Netlify a lot because I have been developing mostly in Vue and sometimes a bit using Nuxt. What was most enticing to me (apart from free tier for personal projects, but I see Vercel has one too?) is that there were a lot of tutorials, guides how to setup CI/CD using Azure Devops/Github etc. So basically no matter what I have chosen there was neat guide for the system. I know that its nothing too complicated to create one from scratch but trying out new tools without documentation might be sometimes too bothersome and there are sometimes things that could take a lot of time to solve on your own. I hope you guys will also provide some guides how to integrate Vercel with existing projects on Azure Pipelines or other CI/CD alternatives. Would really want to try a compare.

We're focused on supporting all frontend frameworks (and we created Next.js, so that's one of our favorites). You are correct, we have a free tier for your personal projects. While we do have git integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, you can always build custom CI/CD with our CLI/API to support your provider of choice. Good feedback on a guide specifically for Azure, we will create this!

How are you going to stop Facebook employing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

React is free and open source, they could always fork it and I guess they are protecting their backs by supporting Vue and Svelte ( employed the creator full time to work on Svelte )

Any support fo HIPAA compliant workflows?

Any plans to support Vue as well?

We already support Vue and Nuxt (and all other frontend frameworks): https://vercel.com/new/templates

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