The biggest shock? Bandwidth overages. We got hammered with a $347 bill (blocked out the trauma) when our shitty marketing site hit Reddit's front page one weekend.
Vercel: The Traffic Tax
Vercel's current pricing is $0.15 per GB after your free 1TB allowance on Pro plan ($20/month per seat). So if you go 100GB over your limit, that's $15 extra ($0.15 × 100 = $15) - way better than the $40 per 100GB some outdated guides still claim.
Still painful when your site blows up:
- Our massive 2MB hero image (yeah, we're idiots) got viewed like 40-60k times = ~100GB burned through (math gets fuzzy when you're panicking about the bill)
- Product gallery with tons of high-res photos just eats bandwidth for breakfast
- Anything that bypasses their edge cache? You're paying full price
The real bullshit? Vercel's image optimization counts against your bandwidth limit. So you pay to optimize images, then pay again when people actually look at them. Double-dipping at its finest.
Figured out a hack: stick Cloudflare Images in front of Vercel. Costs $1 per 1000 transformations but saves you from getting screwed on bandwidth. There's a bunch of other workarounds if you don't want to switch platforms entirely.
Netlify: Build Timeout Hell
Netlify charges $55 per 100GB bandwidth - pricier than Vercel's overages. But their real trap is the 15-minute build timeout on Pro plan ($19/month per seat).
Had to split our Next.js build into three separate Netlify sites because our full build took 18 minutes. The workaround:
- Static assets build (5 min)
- Main app build (12 min)
- Admin dashboard build (8 min)
Each site gets its own Netlify deployment, own custom domain, own set of problems. When I contacted Netlify support, they suggested "optimizing the build process" - wow, revolutionary insight there.
Build minutes cost extra too: $7 per 500 minutes over your limit. Our shitty, bloated build eats an extra $30-40/month just in timeout overages. You can beg for increased timeout but they want your credit card first and it's not automatic.
Cloudflare Workers: The Rewrite Tax
Workers pricing looks cheap: $5/month minimum, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU milliseconds.
Math works out great for simple apps:
- 10M requests × 7ms average = $3.50 CPU + $3 requests = $6.50 total
But Workers runtime isn't Node.js. You'll rewrite everything:
- No file system access (goodbye sharp, goodbye bcrypt)
- No long connections (WebSockets need special handling)
- V8 isolate limitations break half your npm packages
- 10ms CPU limit means optimizing everything
Our migration to Workers was supposed to take a month. Ended up being 3+ months because everything broke twice. Had to rebuild our auth system, image processing, database connections - basically everything. Check the migration guide and compatibility docs but expect surprises. Factor that engineering hell into your "cheap" hosting math.
Per-Seat Pricing Sucks for Teams
Vercel and Netlify charge per developer, which gets expensive:
- 5 devs on Vercel Pro: $100/month before usage
- 5 devs on Netlify Pro: $95/month before overages
- Unlimited devs on Workers: $5/month (period)
The real bullshit? Both platforms count "git contributors" as paid seats. Had to kick a contractor out of our GitHub repo because having them cost $20/month for like 3 commits. Fucking ridiculous. Vercel's policies are buried in docs nobody reads.
Cloudflare doesn't charge per developer - unlimited team for $5 total. Just don't expect it to work like normal hosting. Lots of teams are getting fed up with this seat pricing nonsense.
