I Tested All Three Edge Platforms So You Don't Have To

I didn't set out to test three edge platforms. I just wanted to move my API closer to users because the 200ms response times from my single US-East server were making European customers complain. What started as a simple migration turned into an 8-month odyssey through the wild world of edge computing.

Cloudflare Workers is stupid fast but will make you question your sanity when you hit those CPU timeouts. I learned this the hard way when my image processing function kept timing out during high traffic - usually when I least expected it, like when someone posted our app on HN. Even with the new 5-minute limits they rolled out, it still bites you when you're not careful.

Vercel Edge Functions works beautifully if you're already married to Next.js, but good luck if you want to do anything outside their golden path.

Deno Deploy was the dark horse. I expected it to be half-baked garbage from a company nobody's heard of, but it's actually the most reliable of the three. Go figure.

What \"Performance\" Actually Means When Your Users Are Pissed

Cloudflare Workers is genuinely fast. Like, "did I break my monitoring?" fast. But here's what they don't tell you: the default 30-second CPU timeout will still catch you off guard, even with the new 5-minute max they rolled out in March 2025. My webhook processing function worked fine in testing with 3 webhooks. Production traffic with 50 concurrent webhooks? Timeouts everywhere because I was doing too much JSON parsing. You can bump it up to 5 minutes now, but good luck explaining that to your CFO when the bill comes.

Vercel's cold starts aren't terrible if you're in North America or Europe, but my users in Southeast Asia were getting hammered with 100ms+ response times. Maybe more - the monitoring got pretty ugly. The silver lining? If you're already using Next.js, the developer experience is chef's kiss. Preview deployments work perfectly, and the integration just makes sense. But try to run a non-Next.js project and you'll feel like you're using a hammer to perform surgery.

Deno Deploy has only 6 regions, which should suck, but somehow it doesn't? Maybe because their TypeScript runtime is so clean, or because that 512MB memory limit means you can actually do real work without hitting arbitrary constraints. I migrated a complex ETL function that was constantly timing out on Cloudflare, and it just worked on Deno. No code changes, no optimization tricks.

The Bill That Made My Accountant Cry

Let's talk about money, because this is where things get spicy.

Cloudflare's \"usage-based\" pricing seems reasonable until you realize their bandwidth charges kick in after 10GB. I had a client who was serving PDF files through Workers for "just a few hundred users." Three months later: bandwidth bill was absolutely brutal - I think it was $700-something? Maybe more. I stopped looking. The lesson? Cloudflare is great for APIs, terrible for anything that moves real data. Pro tip: use R2 with custom domains if you're moving files.

Vercel hit me with the classic startup pricing trap. Free tier was amazing, then suddenly I needed team features for $20/month per user. Five developers = $100/month before I even deployed anything. Then the usage charges started hitting. A moderate traffic spike during a Product Hunt launch cost us a few hundred extra - I think it was around $300? Maybe more. All I know is my credit card hurt. The billing dashboard shows you everything, which is nice when you're watching your money disappear in real-time.

Deno Deploy's free tier is honestly embarrassing to the other platforms. 1 million requests per month? I ran my side project for 6 months without paying a dime. Even when I eventually hit the paid tier, it was $20/month flat. No surprise charges, no per-user nonsense. It's almost like they actually want developers to use their platform.

When Your Edge Functions Break in Production

Here's what actually matters when your edge functions break in production and you're fixing things during a weekend outage while your users are screaming on Twitter.

When Your Code Breaks During Black Friday (True Story)

Cloudflare Workers has saved my ass more times than I can count with `wrangler tail`. When users started getting 500 errors during a Black Friday sale, I could see exactly what was failing in real-time. But here's the thing nobody tells you: debugging locally is a pain because the runtime differences between your dev environment and their V8 isolates will bite you. I lost most of an afternoon debugging why my crypto functions worked locally but failed in production - probably spent 4 hours on that stupid bug. Turns out some Node.js crypto APIs aren't available in Workers.

Vercel Edge Functions are amazing when everything works, but when they don't, you're pretty much fucked. I had a race condition that only happened under load, and debugging it was impossible because logs were scattered across different dashboards. The preview deployments are chef's kiss though – being able to share a broken deployment with your team and have them see the exact same error is incredibly useful. Just don't expect to debug anything that requires real production traffic patterns.

Deno Deploy shocked me with how good the error messages are. Remember when you were learning JavaScript and error messages were useless? This is the opposite. When something breaks, the stack trace actually tells you what's wrong and where. No transpilation artifacts, no webpack nonsense, just clean TypeScript errors that point to the actual line that's broken. The only downside? Sometimes the simplicity makes you paranoid that you're missing something important.

What Happens When Product Hunt Destroys Your API

Cloudflare Workers is built for this shit. I had a client whose product got featured on Product Hunt, and traffic exploded - I think we went from like 1000 requests/day to... hell, I don't know, maybe 40K requests/hour? It was chaos. Workers didn't even blink. No configuration changes, no emergency scaling calls, just handled it like a champ. The only time Workers failed me was when I tried to process large JSON payloads during a data migration – hit those CPU limits hard and had to break the work into smaller chunks.

Vercel Edge Functions get weird under sustained load. Light traffic? Perfect. Sudden spike from a viral tweet? The cold starts start stacking up and response times go to shit. I learned to combine edge functions with regular serverless functions for the heavy lifting. The CDN integration is incredible for static assets though – our CSS and images stayed fast even when the edge functions were struggling.

Deno Deploy has surprised me with its reliability. Yeah, only 6 regions sounds limiting, but they picked good locations. My European users get better response times from Deno's Amsterdam region than they did from Vercel's edge network. The platform had some growing pains in 2024 (random 502s, deployment delays), but it's been rock solid for months now. Knock on wood.

The Vendor Lock-in Reality Check

Cloudflare wants to be your everything platform, and honestly, they're pretty good at it. D1 databases, KV storage, R2 object storage, Workers AI – it's all there and it all works together. But holy shit, good luck migrating off once you're deep in their ecosystem. I helped a client move their D1 database to PostgreSQL and it was a nightmare. Their APIs are great but proprietary as hell.

Vercel plays nice with others, mostly because they have to. Their edge functions are focused on what they do best: manipulating requests and responses for frontend apps. Need a database? Use Supabase or PlanetScale. Need file storage? S3 works fine. The downside is you're juggling multiple vendors and bills, but at least you can switch platforms without rewriting everything.

Deno Deploy is actually the most portable option, which is weird for the newest platform. Their built-in KV storage uses standard Web APIs, so your code isn't locked to their platform. Need more storage options? Just use any HTTP API. The Deno runtime is open source, so worst case you can run your code anywhere that supports Deno. It's refreshingly honest.