After that $347 bill destroyed my Sunday, I spent two weeks in full anger mode testing every Vercel competitor I could find. Deployed the same Next.js app to 8 different platforms. Here's what doesn't suck and what's complete marketing bullshit.
Vercel's pricing fucks you when you get popular. People get thousand-dollar bills from traffic spikes. So I tested every alternative that doesn't punish success with surprise billing.
Why I Had to Leave Vercel
The Bandwidth Trap Destroyed My Weekend
Vercel Pro gives you 1TB bandwidth, sounds generous until some dickhead posts your project on r/programming at 2am. I woke up to 673GB used in 6 hours. That's $100 in overages from one fucking post (they cut bandwidth pricing from $0.40 to $0.15/GB in 2024, but still hurts). More than Railway costs for 2.5 months.
Zero warnings. No alerts when I hit 50%, 75%, 90% usage. Just woke up to an email titled "Your Vercel usage exceeded limits." Spent Sunday morning in panic mode trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding. Their dashboard doesn't even let you set usage alerts. It's designed to fuck you.
At $15 per 100GB overage (down from $40 in 2024), traffic spikes still get expensive fast. A 500GB spike costs $75 extra on Vercel. On Railway or Render, the same spike costs nothing. On Cloudflare Pages, you're still under their free limits.
Everything Counts Against You
Image optimization uses your bandwidth. Preview deployments count. Function invocations add up. Team members cost $20 each. Every useful Vercel feature becomes another line item.
Railway charges me around 35-40 bucks a month for everything - database, bandwidth, team access, support. That's less than Vercel charges for one team member.
Migration Hell is By Design
Vercel makes it hard to leave on purpose. Image optimization breaks immediately. Edge functions don't exist elsewhere. Preview URLs work differently. They built vendor lock-in into every feature.
The alternatives learned from this shit. Railway has migration guides. Render helps with transitions. Even self-hosted Dokploy includes import tools.
Railway - What I Actually Use Now
I moved my SaaS to Railway a few months ago and haven't looked back. Same git-push-deploy workflow, same preview environments, but predictable pricing that doesn't spike when I succeed.
What's Actually Included:
- PostgreSQL database (would cost extra on Vercel)
- Unlimited bandwidth on paid plans
- Team collaboration without per-seat charges
- Automated daily backups
- Support that responds in hours, not days
The Migration Process:
Railway's docs are solid but skip the pain points. Took me 7 hours because Next.js 13.4.3 breaks Railway's build container - got some bullshit "Module not found" error until I found a GitHub issue about version conflicts. Had to pin to 13.4.2. Database migration was smooth but setting up Cloudinary took forever because their docs suck for Next.js 13.
Real Performance:
Builds are maybe 20% slower than Vercel but way more reliable. I've had zero downtime in the past few months. Database queries are faster because everything's on the same network instead of calling external services.
What Sucks:
Build timeouts are brutal - 10 minutes max vs Vercel's 45. My TypeScript build hits this limit sometimes and just fails with "Build exceeded maximum duration". No automatic image optimization, had to set up Cloudinary. Preview environments use different subdomains so my OAuth redirect broke initially - took me like an hour to figure out why my login wasn't working.
Render - Good for Different Use Cases
I tested Render for a client project that needed background jobs. Static sites are free forever. Web services start at $7/month. Databases are $7/month. Total: around $14/month for full-stack apps.
Render's Strength:
No gotcha pricing. You pay for compute, period. No bandwidth overages, no function invocation fees, no team seat penalties. Their free tier actually means free.
Perfect For:
- Projects that need background processing
- Teams that want Heroku-style simplicity
- Full-stack apps that outgrew serverless limits
- Anyone tired of surprise bills
Migration Reality:
Builds take fucking forever - like 8 minutes for what Vercel does in 3. No edge functions, had to rewrite my auth middleware as regular API routes. Took me 4 hours of Stack Overflow diving plus some trial and error with TypeScript errors. But zero surprise bills and builds never randomly fail like they do on Vercel.
Appwrite Sites - The New Kid
Went GA recently after being in beta for a while. Not just deployment - authentication, database, storage, serverless functions all integrated. Pricing structure launched with GA, but still way cheaper than piecing together separate services.
Why It's Interesting:
Most alternatives make you piece together auth + database + deployment + storage. Appwrite includes everything. Authentication flows, user management, file uploads - all handled in one platform.
Current Reality:
No longer in beta, went GA recently. Community feedback seems decent so far. Pricing is still reasonable compared to buying Vercel + Auth0 + database + storage separately. Way cheaper than getting vendor-locked into the Vercel ecosystem.
Dokploy - For Complete Control
Self-hosted alternative that gives you Vercel-like deployment on your own VPS. Total monthly cost: whatever your VPS costs ($10-50) plus your time managing it.
Perfect For:
- Agencies with multiple client sites
- Developers comfortable with basic DevOps
- Teams wanting complete data ownership
- Projects with unpredictable traffic (no bandwidth limits)
Reality Check:
You trade vendor management for self-management. Server updates, security patches, monitoring - all your responsibility. But a $20 VPS handles traffic that costs $500+ on Vercel.
I run three client sites on one $40 DigitalOcean droplet. Same sites would cost like $60/month minimum on Vercel Pro, plus overages when they get traffic spikes.
What I Learned About Switching
Calculate Your Real Costs First
Track everything: base plans, overages, team seats, external services. I was spending like $180/month on Vercel including PlanetScale database and Clerk auth. Railway costs me around 35-40 bucks total.
Test Before Committing
Deploy to alternatives on test domains. Run both platforms for 2-3 weeks. I caught performance issues this way that would've been disasters in production. Test with real traffic patterns.
Plan for What Breaks
Image optimization fails immediately - budget for Cloudinary (25-30 bucks) or build-time optimization. Edge functions need rewrites. Database connections might need pooling. But these are one-time fixes, not ongoing costs.
The Switch Itself
Lower DNS TTL to 300 seconds, switch during low traffic, monitor for 48 hours. Keep Vercel running as backup until confident. My migration had 5 minutes downtime total.
The Bottom Line
OK, enough bitching about Vercel. After a few months on Railway, I've saved over a grand compared to what I was paying on Vercel. Zero surprise bills. Better database integration. Faster support responses.
Look, Railway isn't perfect - builds are slower, no automatic image optimization, stricter timeouts. But I sleep better knowing traffic spikes won't bankrupt me.
For static sites, Netlify's free tier beats everyone. For full-stack apps, Railway's flat pricing wins. For maximum control, Dokploy on a VPS can't be beat. For comprehensive backends, Appwrite Sites looks solid now that it's GA. Your mileage may vary depending on your specific setup.
The deployment experience gap narrowed a lot recently. These platforms match Vercel's core features without the surprise bills.
Look, I'm probably being too harsh on Vercel - they built great tech and pioneered a lot of this shit. But when you're getting thousand-dollar surprise bills, the great tech doesn't matter much. The only question is why you're still paying that premium for bandwidth that costs pennies elsewhere.