Vercel Review - I've Been Burned Three Times Now

Look, I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. Vercel is fucking amazing until the moment you realize you're paying $300 for hosting a simple blog. The deployment experience is genuinely the best I've used - git push, wait 30 seconds, done. But their pricing model is designed to get you hooked on convenience then bleed you dry once you scale.

I've migrated three projects off Vercel when the bills got stupid. The last one was a content site doing maybe 100K monthly visitors that somehow racked up $280 in bandwidth costs. Turned out their image optimization was generating 8 different variants of every photo, multiplying our bandwidth usage by like 6x.

What Actually Works (The Good Shit)

The git integration is genuinely magical. Every PR gets its own preview deployment URL automatically. I've demoed features to clients straight from GitHub PRs without any manual deployment bullshit. That alone saves me like 10 hours a month.

Cold starts still suck though. If your API routes sit idle for 20 minutes, the first request takes 2-3 seconds. I learned this the hard way when a client called saying the app felt "broken" during low traffic hours. The workaround is keeping functions warm with cron jobs, which obviously costs more money.

The Next.js integration is legitimately the best hosting experience I've used. Zero config needed - just push and it works. But here's the thing: they know they've got you hooked on convenience, and that's when the pricing fucks you.

Here's Where They Get You

The free tier is actually pretty generous - 100GB bandwidth for hobby projects. That's enough for most personal sites and portfolios. But the moment you upgrade to Pro at $20/month, you're on their turf.

2025 Update: Vercel introduced Fluid Compute this year, which reduces cold starts but uses "Active CPU" pricing that can add up fast. They also expanded their Web Application Firewall features, but it's another cost layer.

Here's the thing about the Pro tier: it's 1TB of bandwidth. Sounds like a lot until you realize their image optimization can turn a 200KB photo into 1.5MB of actual bandwidth usage. My portfolio site with maybe 30 images was burning through 50GB a month just from the optimized variants.

The real fuckyou moments

• Bandwidth overages at $0.15/GB (your blog post goes viral = $100+ surprise)
• Function execution charges that aren't clearly explained
• Image optimization that you can't really turn off without breaking shit

I once had a simple Next.js app spike to $180 in a single day because someone shared it on Reddit. The traffic was maybe 20K visitors, but all those image variants added up fast.

Performance vs Cost Reality

The sites actually load fast as hell. I'm talking sub-200ms response times globally, which is legitimately impressive. The CDN distribution works great, and the automatic optimizations usually improve page speed scores.

But here's what they don't tell you: all that performance costs money. The image optimization creates like 8 variants per image (WebP, AVIF, different sizes). Your 100KB hero image becomes 800KB of bandwidth usage when users visit on different devices.

What actually works

• ISR is genuinely useful - page caches until you need to update
• Edge functions are faster than Lambda (when they work)
• Build times are stupid fast compared to other hosts

What fucks you over

• Image optimization you can't control granularly
• Cold starts on API routes (2-3 seconds after idle)
• No real way to predict costs when traffic spikes

Getting Off Vercel (The Painful Truth)

Yeah, you can migrate away, but it's a pain in the ass. I spent like 3 weeks moving a medium-complexity app to Railway. Had to:

• Rewrite all the image optimization logic
• Replace Vercel's edge functions with regular API routes
• Recreate the preview URL workflow (which is honestly impossible to replicate)

The Next.js code mostly works elsewhere, but you lose all the magic integrations. And good luck explaining to your PM why deployments now take 5 minutes instead of 30 seconds.

Migration costs me about

• 2-3 weeks of engineering time
• Lost productivity from worse tooling
• Client complaints about slower deployments

Who Actually Wins Here

For most developers, Vercel is worth it until around $200-300/month in hosting costs. After that, you're paying a massive convenience premium.

Where Vercel makes sense

• Agency work (client demos are everything)
• Early stage startups (time to market matters more than cost)
• Side projects that might get traffic spikes
• Teams that hate DevOps (understandable)

Where it doesn't

• Cost-sensitive businesses
• High bandwidth applications
• Teams with good DevOps skills
• Anything doing serious scale

The sweet spot is basically "I need this to work perfectly and I don't want to think about infrastructure." Once you can afford a DevOps person, the math changes fast.

The scariest part isn't the high prices - it's how you can wake up to a $400 bill and have no fucking clue why. Vercel's analytics dashboard tells you bandwidth usage but not WHY you used that much. I spent 3 hours one night trying to figure out why my simple blog was burning through 200GB monthly until I discovered their image optimization was creating variants I didn't even know existed.

The Bandwidth Traps I Fell Into

Image Optimization: The Thing Nobody Warns You About

Here's what Vercel doesn't tell you: every image gets turned into like 8 different variants. Your 200KB photo becomes:

• Original format at 3 sizes
• WebP at 3 sizes
• AVIF at 3 sizes
• Plus some other shit I can't even identify

Total result: ~1.5MB of bandwidth per 200KB image. My photography portfolio was using 80GB/month for like 30 photos. Do the math - that's almost 3GB per photo in variants.

Debugging tip that saved me $150/month

Use the Network tab to see what's actually loading. I found Vercel was serving 1920px images on mobile browsers. Took me forever to figure out how to configure the sizes properly.

Cold Starts Still Suck in 2025 (Despite Fluid Compute)

API routes that sit idle for like 20 minutes take 2-3 seconds to respond. I had a client dashboard where users would complain it "felt broken" during low traffic hours. The loading spinner would just sit there while the serverless function woke up.

My workaround was setting up a cron job to ping the API every 10 minutes to keep it warm. Guess what? That costs money too - about $15/month in function execution time.

Edge Functions are supposedly faster, but they use Vercel-specific APIs. So you're trading performance for more vendor lock-in. Pick your poison.

2025 Fluid Compute Update

Their new Active CPU pricing model is supposed to fix cold starts, but now you pay $0.128/hour for "active CPU time" instead of execution duration. For busy apps, this can actually cost more than the old model.

What Actually Saves Money

ISR Saves Your Ass (And Your Wallet)

Convert your getServerSideProps to ISR wherever possible. I cut my function execution costs by maybe 50-60% doing this on a blog. Pages cache for hours/days and only regenerate when needed.

// This costs money every request
export async function getServerSideProps() { ... }

// This caches and saves you cash
export async function getStaticProps() {
  return {
    props: { ... },
    revalidate: 3600 // 1 hour
  }
}

Move Images Off Vercel (Critical for Cost)

Use Cloudinary or AWS S3 for images, keep your app logic on Vercel. I moved a product catalog's 200 images to S3 and saved $180/month immediately.

The setup is annoying but worth it:

1. Upload to S3/Cloudinary
2. Use their image optimization
3. Keep Vercel for everything else

Monitor Your Shit or Get Burned

Set billing alerts at 75% of your limits in the Vercel dashboard. I learned this after a $240 surprise bill. The analytics show bandwidth usage but not WHY - you need to dig into your access logs to debug.

When to Cut Your Losses and Migrate

My Migration Trigger Points

I've migrated off Vercel 3 times now. Here's when it makes sense:

• Monthly bill hits $200+: At this point Railway or Fly.io save you like 60-70%
• Image-heavy site: Vercel's optimization will bankrupt you, use S3 + CloudFront
• Predictable traffic: If you know your usage patterns, self-hosted is way cheaper
• Team has DevOps skills: Why pay the convenience premium?

The Migration Reality (From Experience)

Moving a medium app takes me about 2-3 weeks:

Week 1: Set up new hosting, get basic deployment working
Week 2: Migrate database, recreate CI/CD pipeline
Week 3: Replace Vercel-specific features, performance tuning

The hardest part is losing the preview URLs. I still haven't found anything that works as smoothly as Vercel's PR deployments. That feature alone keeps some of my agency projects on Vercel despite the cost.

What I Actually Use Instead

Railway

My go-to for most new projects. Costs like 1/4 of Vercel, predictable pricing, decent deployment experience. Missing the preview URLs but whatever.

Fly.io

Good for global apps. More complex setup but way cheaper bandwidth. Their Edge locations actually work pretty well.

AWS Amplify

If you're already using AWS, it's fine. Takes longer to set up but costs way less once you're at scale.

Netlify

Still good for static sites. Their Functions are cheaper than Vercel's, but the cold starts are even worse.

None of them have Vercel's magic, but they don't cost $300/month for a fucking blog either.

My Honest Recommendation

Use Vercel if

• You're doing agency/client work (those preview URLs are money)
• You're pre-revenue and need to move fast
• Your team doesn't want to deal with DevOps bullshit
• You have funding and cost isn't an issue yet

Migrate away when

• Monthly bills exceed $200 consistently
• You have predictable traffic patterns
• Your team can handle basic deployments
• Cost matters more than convenience

The sweet spot is about 6-18 months. Use Vercel to get your shit built and deployed, then migrate to something cheaper once you understand your usage patterns. Don't get trapped by convenience when you're paying 5x more than necessary.