Vercel funds and sponsors many open source projects that would otherwise be struggling for funding. Their framework is tailored to the platform they build because that’s a good experience. I don’t currently use them, but people get funneled to their paid plans because it’s a good developer experience. I acknowledge that they are a capitalist enterprise with their own motives, but I think cancer of the modern web is a little strong.

▲

specialp 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

People get funneled to their paid plans out of necessity. While NextJS is open source, the back-end to run it is not. That is where all the complexity lies. Even on Netlify, you run into crazy issues with things like their image stack. It does all this "Optimization" and caching that make it completely impossible to reason about and you run into implementation problems from the providers. Sure you can just run it in a container but then you are taking on all the complexity of NextJS preoptimizations without getting any of them.

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.

▲

rustystump 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Vercel won the techfluencer space like none other. They get a bad rep largely due to the influencer crowd adjacent to them. Influencers are cancer but an almost necessary one like marketing.

Annoying, obnoxious, and always trying to get your email but god damn do they get your attention.

▲

9dev 5 days ago | parent [-]

No. It’s not the influencers, they are just an irrelevant nuisance. It’s the business plan of Vercel, the venture-Capital backed company.

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.

	▲	rustystump 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you know much about oss devs, then you know they make little money for buckets of work. Vercel is a path where they can make good money and still do some amount of oss work. I dont agree with the argument that vercel=bad because they hire people. 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.

▲

badestrand 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree, I don't understand the hate in this thread.

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.