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Comment by cr125rider | Hacker News Reader

I’m very impressed that Vercel is able to sell so little for so much. They do the very bare bones hosting and charge a fortune to run everyone’s inefficient JavaScript framework of the month to replicate the speed and simplicity of a static site. Amazing.

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They own React at this point, it seems. More and more hires I'm coming across know Next.js rather than React itself, and Vercel is now a massive part of the core React contributor team...

What does this mean? How do you "know" nextjs without knowing React? Do you mean they've heard of it and list it on their resume?

It's like Django and Python with Flask. You can be good at using Django, but can't actually build an API with Flask (or program in general)

I had a personal project that was slightly more complex than something like a digital form and I wasn't even able to run it for free (I have zero users, why would I pay?)

At least the Heroku free tier could run all my apps. RIP

On Vercel? How? As long as it's non commercial you should be able to just run it for free there

This been my experience eon Netlify, but not with Vercel. The biggest bottleneck is often the limit of 12 serverless functions per site (technically the limit is dependent on what framework you use which is even more frustrsting).

The function limit is particularly frustrstinb when you need route splitting to avoid slow cold starts or memory limits. I even hit this in a few Astro projects which was particularly suprising - when serverless rendering was an all or nothing option for Astro Vercel was effectively useless on Hobby plans.

The limit of 12 functions is only if you are deploying an API-only project without bundling[1]. The majority of the modern frameworks support bundling, so you can write many, many more APIs (100s+) which compile down to a handful of functions.

This bundling also means fewer cold starts. Bundling is the default for Astro[2]. Also worth noting, on paid plans, functions are kept warm automatically[3].

[1]: https://vercel.com/docs/functions/runtimes#functions-created...

[2]: https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks/astro#configuration-optio...

[3]: https://vercel.com/changelog/vercel-functions-now-have-faste...

Thanks Lee. That makes total sense when using SvelteKit or NextJS on Vercel, when Vercel owns the build step, bundling, and infrastructure you really have a great chance to optimize everything.

Its a bit of a crap shoot with third party frameworks though. With Astro, unless I'm misremembering the timing, they defaulted to bundling per route originally and only changed that when Vercel users ran into issues with the Hobby plan. More interestingly on the timing, I think that was right around the time Vercel took over as Astro's official hosting sponsor. Not sure how much a part that played in the change in defaults.

In general, I'm always hesitant with a build system that I depend on to route split in a way that impacts my actual cost to run. At the end of the day I have little say in how routes are split and little insight into what metrics are used at bundle time to make those decisions. That said, I haven't heard any horror stories with SvelteKit or NextJS on Vercel so the concern may very well be unfounded as long as I stay in the Vercel ecosystem.

1: Vercel is running millions of personal Next.js static sites for free.

2: Inefficient in what sense? In my experience, most of the latest software startups are shipping incredibly quick with Next.js / Vercel stack infra. TS/JS is still a much faster runtime (and only one with types) than the practical alternatives of Python, Ruby, and PHP. There is a single digit percentage shipping new startups in Java/C#. Go could make a decent case.

3: IMO the Next.js / Vercel deployment experience is far far better than what I dealt with wrangling Django templates / non-template integration / deploying anywhere else.

In Django VPS land, you can follow this guide and encounter multiple issues particular to your setup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

and figure out Dokku deployments or GitHub action CI issues.

On Next.js / Vercel, you can:

1: Click a button linking github and Vercel.

2: Enter .env on Vercel

3: git push

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