Vercel’s pricing page | Hacker News Reader

Vercel’s pricing page

theupsellgame.com

191 pointsbartoindahouse65 comments

Funny timing - I was just on a call yesterday about renegotiating our enterprise Vercel contract. The Vercel employees on the call were very friendly, and did share information when prompted, BUT I came away from the call with the understanding that yep, their pricing is intentionally opaque. MIUs are 1 unit = $1, but the rate at which MIU are consumed vary by SKU. Which SKUs do you need, which are you using? Best of luck figuring that out. Cache hit? Fast Data Transfer. Cache miss? Fast Data Transfer _and_ Fast Origin Transfer, so 2x the cost.

For what its worth, they have an internal quoting tool, Copper, which we got a glimpse of on the call. This shows super detailed breakdowns of usage and pricing (for quoting, not actually for billing) and would be really useful to see...but of course they couldn't actually share that information with us.

Anyway, /rant. SaaS pricing being complex and not-exactly-user-friendly is nothing new.

Enterprise pricing always works out to “what can you pay? That’s exactly the price!”

  price = what_you_can_pay * just_how_much_your_problem_is_hurting_you

This is a very naive take. It's so common to get big companies in as signal to others, or just match the current provider you have for X or offer you a cheap price to then hike it up next year, among many other sales tactics. It's definitely not "always ask for the most if the company has a lot". In fact I'd say companies with more money are more likely to get early good deals.

Have you done procurement yourself at the type of companies you describe?

I have sat through a few "license compliance" shakedowns. Sales guys intentionally misreading the license docs to see what they can talk customers into paying. Looking at you, Oracle.

No hate to any of the PaaSes out there, Vercel included. They truly serve a need.

That said, if you are an engineer planning on working in/around the field, I would strongly suggest developing some competence at basic Linux systems administration. (Also: learn SQL, even though it's out of fashion.)

Linux is probably the single technology where my knowledge has had the longest useful lifespan (SQL is probably second). There are Unix (System V) bits I learned decades ago that are still useful today, on Linux.

Then, you can use a PaaS if you want. But if it's not the right fit, you are in a position to do something else. You might find that designing your application with a modern compute stack (this is not a PaaS) gives you an unfair advantage.

I did some interviewing rounds with PaaS platforms for advisory roles. I loved Heroku and was ruined by Heroku so I thought maybe the industry has something new to offer.

The model is largely "built to be locked in" model. It is not something innovative. The issue is that to what scale of operation the platform considers there customer to be locked in where they can hand them a bill that compensates for the ease of entry model for all the hobby/free tier.

With Vercel I feel like these level is becoming lower and lower. You can within minutes launch a full startup with Vercel and AI assisted coding. And Vercel assumes that as long as you do not recieve any traffic that is good. The moment you recieve even a mild amount of traffic you are considered locked in.

To some people that is a fair trade because they have so little trust in their products in the first place investing hours instead minutes is a fair trade. If the traffic comes they are already in the green. If the traffic does not come any effort they have put in puts them in red. So, you put as little effort as possible to get thing out there.

I like Vercel. They have figured a monetization model for Slop SaaS. The other PaaS needs to catch up. In 2026, PaaS exists as a model to make revenue out of slop.

> learn SQL, even though it's out of fashion

In what world is SQL out of fashion??

There's now ~2 generations of professional engineers for whom SQL was rarely/never a thing to learn. Between the hard(er) split among front-end/back-end developers, ORMs improving, and the (flawed) idea that NoSQL would make SQL irrelevant, it has become somewhat of a niche skill.

Think about Firebase. One can be full stack on an app built on Firebase and be successful without ever touching SQL. Firebase is very popular, and has been for some time.

Source: I have worked with a set of otherwise solid engineering teams and can say that SQL familiarity has given me a leg up on very smart engineers who nonetheless do not do relational databases.

The only way you can get away with creating an application without touching sql is of you offload the logic to your backend language, and then I don't think you'd be efficient enough to scale.

Also can someone actually understand the logic of joins, indexes, pks, etc enough to create an efficientand scalable db, and not simply have learned sql by proximity?

> The only way you can get away with creating an application without touching sql

Please look at app platforms like Firebase[1]. There are absolutely complex Web applications running at scale that do not use SQL anywhere in the stack.

Aside from that, MongoDB and Redis are 17 years old; CouchDB is over 20. NoSQL is well-established at this point. All of the hyperscalers offer proprietary NoSQL databases, and have done so for years. A large number of developers uses those databases in production.

In our API-centric environment, there are a lot of apps that don't do much in the way of managing their own data directly at all, using mixtures APIs for auth and other key application functions.

> can someone actually understand the logic of joins, indexes, pks, etc enough to create an efficientand scalable db

If you are not using a relational database, these concepts do not necessarily apply.

1 - https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/querie...

An easy way to host your own and fallback to a PaaS would eat the industry.

If you couldn't be bothered to write it yourself, why should I read it? The same goes for the overly-complex components that express the same idea over and over again, but somehow without adding any clarity.

The wheel you have to spin to have a chance of seeing a new paragraph is so uniquely aggravating it almost feels satirical, like those overcomplicated volume slider UI concepts people were making a while ago. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384

AI;DR Vercel pricing is intentionally opaque and you are likely experience a massive bill, your site being taken offline, or both.

First time I’m seeing AI;DR. I think I’m going to be using that a lot.

I was looking at object storage recently and I hadn't realized how much profit cloud providers drive via egress. And it's so perfectly hidden from the marketing. Ended up going with Cloudflare R2 for free egress.

Just imagine if Huggingface used Vercel and paid their prices. It would cost them quite a few dollars for every decent-size model download. (Or AWS egress prices, or any comparable service.)

I go full course with supabase, they have compatible S3 storages. So auth, db, storage in same place and pretty easy to manage.

Just came across something relevant today: https://hanker.app/blog/how-hanker-cut-90k-a-year-by-moving-...

Digitalocean's (not related to them in any way) app platform (and I'm sure many other cloud providers) provides almost everything that vercel does, at a fraction of the cost. I'm surprised this is not a well known fact.

This post appears to be AI generated (or heavily edited). eg “This wasn’t just about saving money. It was about gaining control over how our system works”

People should also look at Railway especially if majority of your users are in a single region because you will only really pay a price during active times and during times with low activity you will pay almost nothing.

I've never been a Vercel customer and I know their offerings are not entirely comparable but that all seems way expensive compared to Cloudflare. Or Cloudflare plus any cloud service that can autoscale Docker containers and DBs.

I'm assuming the SSO charge is for access to Vercel admin and not end users.

I'm not a Vercel fan, but the whole pitch of PaaS is you get more than just a provisioned server for your application. The 20$/month/dev is vercel's own concept of what that Dev Experience costs with a profit margin + average usage fees paid to AWS baked-in. They might leave that average low, but they assume you're here because you like vercel's tooling, not that you're price shopping for $/BitsTx'd. AWS will always win in that, because vercel is also AWS with some dipping mustards they really want you to lock into.

The hobby plan is a loss leader to get developers into the vercel tooling. If you go over the free tier's bandwidth limit, you've exceeded what vercel believes that developer goodwill is worth for a single account. If they allowed you to pay for extra bandwidth on your free plan, it would make vercel look like a crap cloud platform, because all you're doing at that point is paying a premium for AWS, and a kneecapped version of their developer tooling. They really want you to pay the 20$/month/dev and experience everything in vercel's platform because that's their only product. Honestly... no fault to them on that.

Maybe they'd gain some developer positivity about letting you dig your account out of the "exceeding the hobby limits" hole that's easy to fall into, but the AWS cost for them is already spent, and that was all the budget for appeasing you. You'll have to pay them to pay AWS anyway, so they draw a hard line at that point and demand you also pay to use the vercel tooling, which is the only thing they make. (or, in theory, telling you to go pay AWS yourself if the tooling is unimportant to you.)

They will sell you pay-as-you-go services... but only once you pay their 20$: https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

Over all, I hate it. But I don't think there's anything too hidden about it, or at least no more than any other PaaS provider.

but... none of this justifies hiding price info...?

I mean, it would only justify being expensive

Just to make it clear, I genuinely think they offer a crap deal. They justify being expensive, but what the end user gets in return is not worth it IMO. Do not host anything on Vercel if you can avoid it.

The point I'm making is that the billing becomes very clear once you treat them like a PaaS, not a cloud platform. It's like buying individual seats for corporate software that just happens to also host your application as a side effect. I feel like they make this fact pretty clear on the pricing page.

"$20/month" = a single license for vercel's own tooling

"+ additional usage" = whatever AWS + markup costs... they SHOULD link to the /limits docs [0] from here

"$20 of included usage credit" = "free" coupon to use the overpriced AWS services with the pitiful soft-limits listed in detail below

"Drag the sliders. Watch the $20 plan disappear." is a misreading of vercel's pricing chart. "Vercel Pro" was never 20$, especially not for 5 users, since that's 5 licenses for vercel's tooling, which is the ONLY thing they make here. You essentially get a coupon letting you use that tooling on AWS via their control panel, but beyond that they have 0 involvement in the cloud market. They list the soft limits under the column in the price chart, and they have that /limits page detailing their insanely marked up overage charges. [0] IMO, that's not hidden, it's just a bad deal.

They selfishly assume their tooling IS the product you're here for and whatever hurdles exist to use it will just be tanked. "theupsellgame.com" also complains that the hobby plan has no way to pay for it. Why would I sell the supermarket apples at my fruit stand placed directly in-front of the supermarket if you aren't going to also buy my superior Apple Eater's Experience package.

Again, I think they're leeches. I just think this site uses weak arguments for why Vercel is awful.

[0] https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

Our first year on Vercel, the bill was $40,000. When our management went back to negotiate the second year, Vercel wanted $120,000! Vercel wasn't offering 3x the features, mind you, they just knew we were locked in. Our management got it down to $60,000 (still a 50% cost increase, year over year).

Our app is small beans, too. We don't even have that many users. To borrow a favorite term from DHH, Vercel are "merchants of complexity."

But they're only half the problem. Our management is the other half. They can't be bothered to grow a spine and move away from Vercel. So we'll just keep paying, and eventually some people will "be affected" by a "reduction in force."

My favorite Vercel pricing was the one where their AI token offering is just a wrapper around OpenRouter, and where OpenRouter has a few models for free, Vercel was charging for them.

Looking now, Arcee is no longer free, but the exact same tokens/model costs more on Vercel.

https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models?providers=arcee-ai

https://openrouter.ai/provider/arcee-ai

arcee-ai/trinity-large-thinking

Vercel: $0.25/M $0.90/M

Arcee: $0.25/M $0.80/M

It's fantastic that they let user purchase SSO as an add-on!

Not defending the practice but it’s really the enterprise tax.

no, with vercel it's an independent add-on. unique AFAIK.

I am saying this quite common and part of it is simply an enterprise tax. Yes vercel breaks it up into a separate charge but that’s their playbook and maybe they can better represent their costs and margin internally. I was only pointing out that SSO is almost always hated because enterprises will want/need it.

Edit not sure why I typed hated. I mean always upcharged.

yes, i understood, and i am saying you are wrong.

the enterprise tax also always includes other features (often you don't care about those -- acknowledged and that's why we call it ssotax because "we" only want the sso portion), and is priced per-seat. it's particularly vile when removal of dark patterns is also gated behind the ssotax/enterprise tier. such as advertising to every user.

the vercel offering is a flat price per month and doesn't bring in other stuff you don't care about. it's very well priced and you pay for just the value you want. it's unfair to lump it into the concept of ssotax.

Yes I understood but let me make my position clearer.

Call it unique but it’s because they are marketing it on a consumption model where they can obfuscate the cost of compute. The upcharge for SSO is still very healthy margins hence my point it’s sadly an enterprise markup because all enterprise will have to use it. Sure it’s not gated behind the enterprise bundle but it still has significant markup.

So I am not sure what I am wrong about it’s more opinion than fact. Yes they break apart costs but I am saying said cost still is inflated. But mea culpa, I am wrong!

I guess one could argue that flat pricing is actually quite expensive, and more akin to ssotax than real value. I guess it depends on the median team size that adds this feature.

Vercel isn't Heroku.

It is the business model to sponsor React, Next.js, the go to frontend and serverless deployment of enterprise headless SaaS products from Sitecore, Optimizely, AEM, SAP, Contentful, Sanity,... thanks to their partnerships that make Vercel the main option.

Vercel is similar to adopting Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2,.... its use is decided at upper level, not what to use for weekend projects.

This will be the last month of my Vercel Pro Plan for now. I logged into Vercel just now to see what day of the month the billing period ends so I can move any projects or backup metadata before then, and when I clicked it, the page had the title "March 2026: Monthly Pro Plan". Needless to say, the invoice will not be for March, by any stretch. On the same page it says "This invoice will continue updating until the end of your billing period on May 20."

People aren't ranting about Vercel just because of aversions to trends or their marketing style. It's also because it has legitimately been buggy too often. A year ago I commented on HN about some other issues I experienced and that doesn't include weirdness with their open source or AI stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588909

That said, I still think Vercel is a reasonable choice. Just not my top choice right now.

Edit: by the way, remember now.sh? https://x.com/vercel/status/717764348706316288 It's funny that ten years later, there is a similar service with a similar name, exe.dev

Alternative PAAS without the gotchas? Would appreciate proven alternatives. Thanks.

Coolify, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages (and Workers), Fly.io, Render, Railway...

Even GCP Firebase and AWS Amplify almost qualify as PaaS.

PSA: Railway just had this recent f*ck up - https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

It's not Railway's fault that he didn't read the docs and thought it'd be a good idea to play Russian roulette.

lifeof_jer had this fuck-up, not Railway.

None of which are nearly as beginner friendly as vercel.

And with Vercel you get to pay to stay a beginner forever.

It’s a tradeoff.

I've had a great experience with cloudflare pages. It doesn't get much easier than using their cli (wrangler) to sync up a local folder. I suppose the exception is SSR, but then again I absolutely despise SSR so I don't think it counts.

Do they finally support native compiled languages like Vercel?

Webassembly doesn't count.

I hated pages until I started using the cli. I have started using it more for prototypes, etc. can’t beat it for the price.

The only one that I would point out as better is Render, as it allows for containers, all others are worse than Vercel, in tooling, and supported languages for serverless on the backend.

Cloudflare Workers are awesome. You can do a lot on the $5 tier. Their CLI tool `wrangler` is quite excellent.

Code generation tools know their APIs and they have excellent docs, so getting up and running isn't very difficult.

I'm going to plug Cloud 66 here for you as well. You get a happy middle between a fully managed PaaS and running your own servers.

off topic but I just wonder if this page is AI-designed. It looks quite good to my eyes. I feel like prior to coding agents this would instead be a blog post with some charts.

No doubt, these sites are now a dime a dozen. Flashy but really low signal to noise ratio, you can't unsee it.

Excellent work - thank you!

Claude worked hard on it for many minutes!

Tokens aren’t free, you know!

Someone pls make something like this for Netlify

Pure slop page, even by recent HN submission standards. Straight from Opus' mouth, minimal editing done.

I’ve been seeing this pattern a lot recently on HN. Single prompt preachy website designed to get attention.

Even if I’m in support of the subject matter (how many hours apple bugs waste for example), I think it’s generally in bad taste to be wasting the time of everyone on HN by fooling people with a website that’s meant to imitate something thought invoking.

for what it's worth the creator mentioned this site was made in a couple of minutes lol

Am I getting old or can you guys actually read this site? The text is tiny and gray...

No, I feel the same way.

Serving 1M MAU for $1300/mo sounds like a reasonably good deal to me. I'm not a Vercel customer because I'd rather host my own infrastructure that isn't black-boxed by a bunch of abstraction I don't need. But no one should expect that $20/mo buys you much at all in the way of compute resources or bandwidth. You can't even get a home internet connection for $20 in a lot of places.

Not sure what the author is expecting -- a hosted site to be free forever no matter how big it gets? This site feels like someone grinding the dullest axe on the smallest possible wheel.

The author isn't expecting anything. Opus might be, as that's what wrote eveyrhting.

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