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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Vercel is the second company to “eat the cloud from outside in”. (https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go)

its now my defacto playbook for building lasting bottom up disruptive cloud companies. start by giving away an extremely good free tier (cloudflare - cdn, vercel - nextjs+hosting) then add build time compute, run time compute, readonly kv store, and now full read write storage.

(this is part of an overall cloud progression that i've been studying for a couple years https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1417136897894326277)

many other platforms try to start off offering everything under the sun, claiming to care about the holistic end to end experience. vercel bet correctly on one wedge, built it up over years, and only now is expanding into storage. well earned.

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Will they run my workloads without requiring my attention for decades? I'd love to rewrite and move some old PHP sites from my webhost, but that one has been hosting them without requiring my attention for probably close to 15 years. I'm a little skeptical these fancy cloud runtimes will even exist a few years from now.

Also nodejs is deprecating versions at an impressive rate. Todays LTS will be out of date soon. AWS and thus Vercel have to follow along. So you can’t run a node based serverless app for more than a year or two before you either put the work in to upgrade or just cross your fingers that the forced upgrade won’t break your app.

Classic VC-backed B2B play. The trick, however, is finding a "wedge" people actually want on its own. Unfortunately that seems to be easier said than done.

well a good start is betting on the most popular framework in the most popular language and building the production ready stuff that is missing that the framework authors constitutionally cannot compete with you on :)

there are better wedges financially speaking but theres pretty much no bigger bottom up developer wedge than this one

They built the framework too, or was it a purchase originally?

Guillermo the Vercel CEO made Next.js

Vercel (then called Zeit) developed NextJS themselves. I believe swyx meant React when he said "framework", even though one can argue that's technically incorrect it's been commonplace for some time to call it a framework.

There’s a lot of magic with Vercel, but I think the true “wedge” was clear to many people: DX. The trick was really the execution, which they nailed. They realized early that there was a whole class of developers out there, many of them quite talented, who couldn’t stand SSH’ing into Linux boxes, configuring htaccess files, installing SSL certificates, etc. Many of these developers also worked at big companies, and held sway.

They distilled the entire deployment process into a few clicks and boom, you have a real, functioning, fast website. Then they added templates, good marketing, and doubled down on React. The rest is history. It’s a well executed vision and I give them a lot of props for that.

What just like Netlify who did it a few years earlier?

They fell over by not having a Next.js type solution and could have spent more time on DevRel.

Their pricing structure change didn’t help either

If there was a Netlify framework that leveraged up the platform that got you started quick I bet they would have more mindshare

I kinda feel there was quite a time and tech stack gap between sshing into a server to edit .htaccess files and Vercel.

I wouldn't think that live .htaccess file editing was what they were disrupting :)

> now my defacto playbook for building lasting bottom up disruptive cloud companies

What companies have you built (or played a role in building) using this "playbook" that fit your description?

Cloudflare own and run the services they’re offering whereas it looks like Vercal storage is just other people’s services rebranded

Users don't care about that.

Generally, that is very true. But when the bills start hitting, users absolutely do care and will go out of their way to avoid it.

Only when it reaches ridiculous enough number. Even as an individual who can easily do any cloud/k8s/lambdas/firecracker, I am paying Vercel a few hundred for my side projects.

True, but the ridiculous number might be lower than you expect. Vercel in particular has got a lot of feedback about their pricing!

… for as long as there is no cheaper competition.

They do, actually. We don't say anything about running our own infrastructure. And every time someone finds out, they're like "why didn't you lead with that?"

I'm surprised how much people care about what's under the covers.

I think that in many ways is because Fly's approach is sufficiently high-minded (in other words, aiming most comfortably at relatively difficult problems) that it's probably pretty automatic to assume that it's built on an existing hyperscaler. Mentioning that you run your own infrastructure adds encouragement that you know what you're doing.

Given the general state of PaaS offerings, this is a differentiator.

I think they care. Vercel is VC money. Not even close to profitability. Anyone building anything but a toy needs to take into consideration that Vercel might not be here in 2 years from now

I believe this is a core factor as to why Supabase hasn't joined Cloudflare and Vercel, they don't have that "outside" aspect. By all other counts, they are well established to do so and who knows maybe they do have something in the works to tie in their offerings together from the "outside".

(am supabase investor) fortunately supabase's value prop is so straight forward it doesnt quite need to do the "outside-in" maneuver. just make postgres into a developer friendly platform. huge TAM in itself. another investor i asked on why they put $millions into supabase simply said "RDS has more than $1b ARR"

Great point about being direct, and the priority on DX seems to be a semi-moat in itself, worked for Vercel and Supabase so far!

> https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1417136897894326277

Companies are leasing out the core aspects of computing (storage, networking, CPU, GPU, auth), nothing really insightful here. Just your average day in capitalism.

> many other platforms try to start off offering everything under the sun

Do they? Or do they also start small, then build up over the years until they have everything under the sun, rinsing and repeating the process.

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