Got Hit With a $3k Vercel Bill Last Month: Real Platform Costs

Look, I got burned hardest by Vercel. Netlify and Cloudflare have their own ways to destroy your budget, but Vercel function invocations nearly killed our startup. This is that disaster story, plus the other ways these platforms will screw you over.

Vercel: The Hidden Function Invocation Bomb

Vercel's $20/month Pro plan looks innocent until your Next.js app goes viral. Each API route hit, each ISR page generation, each middleware execution counts as a "function invocation." The 1M included invocations disappear faster than coffee at a developer conference.

Remember that art platform that got hit with like a $90k+ weekly bill? Yeah, that shit's real. Their serverless functions went completely mental when they went viral. Other developers documented similar cost explosions but honestly, when you're bleeding money that fast, you stop reading case studies and start panicking.

Shit that'll fuck your budget (learned the hard way):

• Edge functions eat CPU time like crazy - we hit 2+ hours daily somehow with Next.js 14.2 JWT stuff
• Bandwidth costs add up fast - 10TB during launch week = bankruptcy at $0.15/GB
• Next.js App Router is a function invocation bomb - every page hits like 3-5 endpoints for route handler, middleware, layout bullshit
• next/image optimization counts as function calls - our product images site was hitting 50+ executions per page, complete madness
• Middleware runs on fucking everything - even favicon.ico goes through auth at $0.60 per million (disabled this after 3 days of bleeding money)
• Enterprise pricing jumps to $45k+ minimum and they won't budge until you actually threaten to leave

The worst part? Vercel's usage dashboard updates every 4-6 hours. During a traffic spike, you're flying blind. By the time you see "holy shit" numbers, you've already burned through your monthly budget.

Still don't know why their middleware was so fucking expensive. Works fine now but I'm scared to touch anything. Sometimes it randomly spikes to 50+ CPU hours for no reason we can figure out.

Netlify Also Sucks (But Different Flavor of Expensive)

Look, after getting fucked by Vercel I researched Netlify. Their $19/seat pricing seems reasonable until you realize bandwidth costs are straight highway robbery. That developer who got hit with a $104k bill for a static site? That's what happens when you trust their "reasonable" pricing.

The gotchas that'll bankrupt you:

• $55 per 100GB bandwidth overage - nearly 4x more expensive than AWS CloudFront and they know it's predatory
• Build minutes evaporate like fucking magic - our TypeScript 5.2 + Next.js 14 builds take 12-18 minutes each, sometimes 25+ when npm's resolution algorithm is complete garbage
• Serverless functions count separately - 125k included sounds generous until your API routes start getting hammered
• Large Media add-on costs $60/month for Git LFS support - no way around it for asset-heavy sites, and it randomly fails to sync files
• No automated kill switch for DDoS attacks - been requested for 3+ years, still not implemented because why would they kill their revenue stream?
• Analytics add-on is $9/month per site - basic usage stats that Cloudflare gives free (and does better)

Personal experience: Our team hit the 25k build minute limit by day 12 of the month because our Typescript compilation was slow as shit. Each additional 500-minute package costs $7, and with 15+ deploys per day, you're looking at $100+/month just in build overages.

Cloudflare's Bait and Switch (Heard This Horror Story Too)

After the Vercel disaster, I looked into Cloudflare. Their "unlimited" bandwidth marketing is pure fucking bullshit. Friend of mine got a sales call demanding $5k/month after his crypto site hit some mystery threshold.

The hidden costs nobody talks about:

• Unlimited is marketing speak - push 50TB/month and you get a friendly sales call demanding $5k/month or account suspension
• Advanced features require separate subscriptions - analytics, bot protection, enterprise security all cost extra and the upselling is relentless
• Build limits are strict - 500 builds/month on free sounds generous until you're doing proper CI/CD with feature branches
• No advanced deployment features - preview deployments are half-assed compared to Vercel/Netlify, and custom redirects just break randomly
• Cache purge lies - says "5 minutes" but actually takes 20-45 minutes globally, making deploys look broken to users

Reality check: Your "free" Cloudflare setup becomes a $200+/month bill when you add Analytics, Bot Management, and Workers for any dynamic stuff. Classic ecosystem lock-in bullshit.

Plus their cache purge is straight-up broken - says "5 minutes" but takes 20-45 minutes globally. Makes deploys look fucked to users and I've never found a way to speed it up.

The Harsh Truth

All three platforms are designed to get you hooked on their free tiers, then milk you when you're locked in. The real cost isn't the base subscription - it's the surprise overages when your site actually succeeds.

Pick your poison based on what will hurt least when things go sideways:

• Vercel: Death by a thousand function invocations
• Netlify: Death by bandwidth gouging
• Cloudflare: Death by feature upselling

I've seen too many developers get blindsided by hosting bills. Here are the actual gotchas that'll wreck your budget, based on real production disasters I've witnessed.

The Nuclear Bills: What Actually Happens

Vercel Function Explosion (True Story)

Last year, I helped a startup migrate off Vercel after their bill exploded - like thousands of dollars in one day. Their React admin panel was a complete disaster - each page was hitting like 20+ API calls for some insane reason, and their Next.js middleware was running on every fucking request. With a few thousand concurrent users during their product launch, function calls went absolutely mental - had to be millions, maybe tens of millions.

Basic plan was $20/month, then function calls exploded and suddenly they owed like $17k+. Math didn't make sense until I realized middleware was running on every goddamn request. Edge requests hit the roof too because every route was going through auth middleware.

By the time we figured out what was happening, they'd burned through tens of thousands. I stopped trying to calculate exact numbers after the first $100k and just started panicking.

Vercel's usage dashboard showed the damage 8 hours too late. By then, they'd already racked up a quarter million in overages. The founder called me at 3am asking if the numbers were real. They were real.

Eventually something worked (pretty sure it was this but honestly I was panicking and tried like 6 different things):

## Think these were the commands but I was half-asleep and panicking:
vercel env add MAINTENANCE_MODE=true  # Or was it MAINT_MODE? Something like that
vercel env add DISABLE_FUNCTIONS=true  # Maybe DISABLE_ALL_FUNCTIONS?
vercel --prod --force  # Took forever to deploy

## If nothing works, nuke everything:
vercel remove your-app --hard  # Nuclear option, pray you have backups

Killed all their dynamic shit but stopped the money bleeding. Sometimes you just gotta pull the plug and deal with angry users instead of bankruptcy.

Netlify's Bandwidth Trap (Personal Experience)

My client's design agency site got featured on Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks the same week. Traffic exploded from like 5k to hundreds of thousands of visitors in a few days. Their massive 4K videos and high-res portfolio images meant each visitor was pulling insane amounts of data - like 10+ MB per visit or something ridiculous.

Bandwidth went absolutely mental - from their normal ~60GB monthly to like 3-4TB during that viral week. Netlify's $55 per 100GB pricing fucked them hard. I remember staring at the bill thinking this couldn't be right, but the math was brutal.

Netlify's bandwidth pricing at $55 per 100GB is fucking brutal compared to AWS CloudFront at $8.50 per 100GB. Same CDN performance, 6x the cost.

What I learned: Always set up Cloudflare proxy in front of Netlify for high-traffic sites. Eat the complexity, save your bank account. This technique is well documented in Cloudflare's optimization guides for reducing origin bandwidth costs.

Cloudflare's Bait and Switch

Don't believe the "unlimited" marketing. A cryptocurrency news site I consulted for pushed 50TB/month through Cloudflare Pages (legitimately - they had viral price analysis tools). After 3 months, Cloudflare sales called with an ultimatum:

"Your usage patterns indicate commercial intent. Please upgrade to Enterprise at $5,000/month or we'll suspend your account in 30 days."

Translation: Unlimited means "until we decide it doesn't."

Build Minutes: The Silent Killer

TypeScript + Cypress = Complete Bullshit

Our builds take forever when they work, even longer when they don't:

• TypeScript randomly recompiles the entire universe - like 4 minutes sometimes, 15+ when it's having a bad day. Never figured out why.
• Next.js build usually takes forever, but image optimization randomly decides to hate life and takes twice as long
• Cypress tests - who the fuck knows, sometimes quick, sometimes it sits there for 30+ minutes doing nothing
• Lighthouse audits either work instantly or fail with zero explanation

We're constantly building shit with feature branches and hotfixes. Netlify's 25k build minutes sound generous but we burned through them crazy fast. Build overages killed us that month.

Still haven't figured out why builds randomly explode on identical code. Could be cache corruption, could be TypeScript being TypeScript, could be npm having a bad day. This is just life now.

Found this config in some random blog post (after trying like 6 different Stack Overflow "solutions" that did jack shit). Cut our builds from whatever they were to maybe 7-8 minutes on good days. No idea why half these settings work:

## netlify.toml - what actually worked on Node 18.17.1
[build]
  command = \