For context, I've been working on the MCPJam inspector. It's an open source dev tool to test and debug MCP servers. We did an entire rebuild from Vite + Express to Next.js two weeks ago. We did this out of personal preference - we've built stuff in Next.js before and like its routing system and built in backend.

Switching to Next was a mistake for our use case. We didn't consider that our users are starting MCPJam with npx. Our npm package size exploded to 280MB. Next.js was too heavyweight for a locally ran web app. Switching back to Vite + Hono brought our package size to 9MB, much more manageable.

This post isn't to bash Next.js. It's just to remind you that tech stack does matter. We didn't think about the consequence of switching to Next and didn't consider our users' use of npx. If MCPJam was a hosted webapp, it would probably matter less. Remember to think about your stack's tradeoffs before you commit to building!