Vercel was founded (or co-founded?) by the author of Next.js. That's a very different story. Vercel is like what some hypothetical Astro Cloud could have become if it had grown out of Astro.

It gets to be THE platform where to deploy frontends for many headless enterprise CMS and comerce stores that due to partnerships with Vercel only have Next.js based SDKs.

Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.