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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Jumping onto a Next.js project right now that has no reason to have SSR. The code is now excessively complex, difficult to detangle, and I can't believe how bad the local DX is on a cold start on an M1 MBP. It's so slow; every nav is agonizing. Maybe it's how this is configured, maybe it's some other issue, but I definitely didn't encounter this with OOB stock Nuxt.js and of course, this project is an app that has no reason nor benefit for using Next.js.

No idea how Vercel scammed so many people. Founder paid an annual contract of $##,### to Vercel for what should be a freely hosted static web app + freely hosted (within credit boundaries) backend in a serverless container (e.g. Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, etc.)

A complete scam.

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I guess the branding and marketing worked.

Last time I checked Vercel was just reselling services of AWS.

Hey that's short selling them, they also managed to make HTTP middleware not work like you'd expect in nextjs which has some arcane advantage when hosted on Vercel.

    > I guess the branding and marketing worked.

Indeed; I remember watching one of their tech sessions around the Next.js 12 to 13 release and then watching a Microsoft one. One was very clearly a marketing ad.

We shortly ditched Next.js afterwards because of how janky the whole DX was the entire time and how much worse it was during the transition.

Now I'm back in a Next.js 15 project and it's amazing that the DX somehow feels even worse!

They introduce a lot of shiny half-baked features while abandoning old ones.

NextJS now is unecessary complex, and there are things to avoid to make sure everything works fine.

I am not sure why it is so slow for you, maybe you you can try run this boilerplate (work in progress to make it easy to use)

https://github.com/wizecore/boilerplate-saas/

It uses Pages router, comes with local postgres, redis and AWS sqs emulator. No docker, no cloud needed for it to work locally.

Such setup is crazy fast on my mbp m2 pro.

You don't have to use SSR: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/static-exports

Yes, of course, it has SSG and ISR as well, but then you are overall better off with something else like a VitePress for fully static, React + Vite if you still want React and build a static app, or use Astro.js if you need some client side reactivity.

Next.js is a lot of marketing for a terrible product.

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