Vercel is the cancer of the modern web. The claw into every framework ecosystem and abuse them as sales funnels for their paid plans, pretending they care about open source, competition, and the web.
And I think their paid hosting was actually really good, up until they switched their $20/month plan to a whatever-it-may-cost and we-send-you-10-cryptic-emails-about-your-usage-every-month plan. That's when they lost me, not because it got more expensive but because it became intransparent and unpredictable and annoying instead of carefree.
Annoying, obnoxious, and always trying to get your email but god damn do they get your attention.
They hire the core contributors of all major web frameworks to continue development under their roof. Suddenly, ongoing improvement of the web platform is largely dependent on the whims of Vercel investors.
They pretend to cater to all hosting providers equally, but just look at Next, which will always be tailored toward Vercel. When will it happen to Nuxt? Sveltekit? Vercel is in a position to make strategic moves across the entire SSR market now. Regardless of whether they make use of that power, it’s bad enough they wield it at all.
When has this ever been a good idea? When has it produced a good outcome? It never has, and it never will.
The fact you use the term ssr market is a key point to how effective vercel’s marketing has been via techfluencers. There isnt a market for ssr in the way you use it, only web hosting.
There is a world of engineering outside js framework relevancy wars. It isnt only vercel pushing the framing btw. Other players are trying to replicate the vercel marketing playbook. Use/hire techfluencers/oss devs to push frameworks/stacks on devs who then push it up the company stack.
Usually it doesnt work for a startup but vercel proved it can.
Enter a million lite framework wrappers around well known tech, like supabase and postgres, upstash and redis, vercel and aws.
Serverless framework attempted to make this stack to run yourself for Next but it is buggy due to the complexity of Next. Open source includes being able to run it. Releasing the framework and funding OSS that also enhances NextJS is nice, but it is a trap because if it comes time to seriously run it, your only option is vercel.