Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.

What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.

Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIVL4JMqRfc

Can you describe what you mean here? Because I have heard this about 100 times and never understood what people mean when they say this. I am hosting a NextJS site without Vercel and I had no special consideration for it.

Next.js isn't just a static site generator.