Vercel Alternatives That Don't Fuck You Over

Last month my Vercel bill hit $400. The month before? $50. Same traffic, same app. That's when I realized Vercel's "predictable" pricing is anything but.

The final straw was when our Next.js app started hitting serverless function timeouts during a Black Friday sale. 10-second limit, no exceptions, no workarounds. Our checkout process was failing and Vercel support basically said "maybe try breaking your logic into smaller functions."

The Real Problems Nobody Talks About

Bill Shock is Real
Your first Vercel bill will be reasonable. Then you'll get some actual traffic and wonder why you're paying $200 for bandwidth that costs $20 on Cloudflare. That calculator on their pricing page? Pure optimistic fiction that assumes your app stays as popular as a MySpace profile in 2025.

Serverless Functions Are A Trap
10-second timeout means you can't process payments, send emails, generate reports, or do basically anything useful. Want WebSockets? Too bad. Need background jobs? Doesn't exist. Real-time features? Hope you enjoy polling. Even their Pro plan caps at 5 minutes, which is barely enough for real work. Meanwhile, platforms like Railway handle long-running processes without arbitrary timeouts.

Next.js Lock-in is Sneaky
They get you hooked with ISR and edge functions, then you realize these don't work anywhere else. Migrating means rewriting half your app because you used Vercel-specific APIs. Even deploying Next.js on other platforms requires understanding their vendor-specific optimizations.

Enterprise Support is a Joke
$20k minimum for custom contracts. Their "Pro" support is email-only with 24-hour response times. When your app is down, 24 hours feels like 24 years. Compare that to Railway's Discord where actual engineers respond in hours, or Render's support that actually helps instead of suggesting you "try redeploying."

Here's what finally pushed me over the edge: during a critical deployment issue, I lost a full day of productivity because their dashboard was buggy and showed conflicting information. The deploy logs said success, the functions said they were deploying, but the site was serving a 404. Support's response after 8 hours? "Try redeploying."

That's when I started researching alternatives in earnest. Turns out there are platforms that don't actively try to screw you over - they just want to host your app and charge you fairly for it. Revolutionary concept, I know.

After wasting months and thousands of dollars on Vercel's bullshit, I migrated 8 production apps to other platforms. Here's what actually works when you need reliability over hype, ranked by how much they'll save your sanity:

Netlify - For When You Just Want It To Work

I've been using Netlify for 4 years and it rarely breaks. Their new credit-based pricing is confusing, but at least they don't surprise you with $300 bills. Their build system is solid, and branch deploys actually work without configuration hell.

What it's good for:

Static sites, documentation, marketing pages. The form handling is solid - we've processed 50k+ form submissions without issues. Their edge locations provide global CDN performance that actually works.

The gotcha:

Their functions have the same 10-second timeout as Vercel. Also, the credit system launched in September 2025 and nobody understands it yet. I'm still on the old pricing and scared to migrate. Check their community for horror stories about billing surprises.

Real experience:

Our company website has been on Netlify for 3 years. Zero outages, maybe 2-3 build issues that fixed themselves. The branch preview feature is genuinely useful - we use it for client reviews.

Render - The Heroku That Actually Works

Moved our main app to Render after Heroku's free tier disappeared. It's what Heroku should have been if they gave a shit about developers. Their deployment model is clean, and their autoscaling actually works without configuration hell.

What it's good for:

Full-stack apps that need real backends. Their Postgres is solid, Redis works, background jobs don't timeout randomly. Their platform maintenance is transparent with actual communication.

The gotcha:

Free tier spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity. Cool for demos, useless for production. Also, build times are unpredictable - sometimes 2 minutes, sometimes 15.

Real experience:

We've been on Render for 18 months. Their support is actually helpful (responded in 2 hours on Sunday). Only major issue was when they had an outage that lasted 3 hours, but they were transparent about it on their status page. Unlike Vercel's vague "investigating" messages.

Railway - For When You're In A Hurry

Railway is stupid simple. Connect GitHub repo, it detects everything, provisions a database, and you're live in 5 minutes. Until the bill arrives. Their usage-based pricing sounds great until reality hits.

What it's good for:

Prototypes, side projects, getting MVPs live fast. The observability dashboard is beautiful. Their template system gets you started with popular stacks instantly.

The gotcha:

Usage-based pricing sounds great until you get traffic. My side project went from $5 to $60 in one month because someone shared it on HackerNews.

Real experience:

Used Railway for 6 different prototypes. 4 stayed under $10/month, 2 exploded in cost. Their Discord support is fantastic though - devs actually respond and fix issues. Check their feedback board for feature requests.

Self-hosted - For When You Hate Vendors

Moved our biggest app to a $40 DigitalOcean droplet running Coolify. Now I'm the DevOps team, but at least I control my own destiny. Fly.io is another option if you want control without full self-hosting.

What it's good for:

When you're tired of vendor bullshit and have some Linux skills. Our monthly hosting cost dropped from $200 to $40. Check out CapRover or Dokku for PaaS-like experiences on your own servers.

The gotcha:

When something breaks at 2am, you're fixing it. No support tickets, no blame-shifting. Just you and the server logs.

Real experience:

Been self-hosting for 8 months. Saved ~$1,500 in hosting costs, but spent probably 40 hours on setup and maintenance. Worth it if you value control over convenience. Check out Awesome Selfhosted for community-curated tools and resources.