Deno Deploy - Finally, a Serverless Platform That Doesn't Suck

Deno Deploy is what happens when the Deno team got sick of AWS Lambda taking forever to boot up. It runs your TypeScript at the edge using V8 isolates instead of spinning up entire fucking containers like Lambda does. I've watched Lambda cold starts hit 2+ seconds during peak traffic while Deploy stays under 50ms even when everyone and their mom is hitting it.

Deploy has 6 regions as of September 2025. Yeah, only 6 - Cloudflare Workers has 300+ locations if you want to get depressed about global coverage. But at least Deploy routes requests automatically instead of making you configure 20 different region settings like AWS.

Edge-First Architecture

Your code gets distributed to all 6 edge locations automatically instead of sitting in one AWS data center in fucking Virginia like it's 2015. I migrated an API from a single us-east-1 Lambda and watched response times drop from 250ms to 45ms for my European users. Actually works without 3 hours of CloudFront configuration.

Reality check: 6 regions means users in Africa or Southeast Asia are fucked with 200ms+ latency. I had users in Bangkok complaining about slow load times - turns out the closest Deploy region was still 180ms away. Cloudflare Workers would've been 40ms with their massive edge network.

V8 isolates start in 15ms vs Lambda's 300-800ms container bullshit. I've watched Lambda take 2+ seconds to boot during AWS outages while Deploy stays under 50ms. The difference is night and day when you're debugging at 3am and every cold start feels like an eternity.

The catch: V8 isolates mean no filesystem access. Zero. None. Your fs.writeFile() calls will throw Error: Forbidden API access and crash your app. I spent a weekend refactoring a file upload service that worked perfectly in Node.js but shit the bed on Deploy because it tried to write temp files to disk.

TypeScript-Native Execution

Deploy transpiles your TypeScript on deployment using SWC (written in Rust, so it's actually fast). No webpack.config.js that breaks with every update. No tsconfig.json with 50 lines of cryptic compiler options. Just write TypeScript and deploy - it fucking works.

You can import packages directly from URLs like import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std@0.200.0/http/server.ts" or use JSR packages. No package.json with 500 dependencies that install differently on every machine. Dependencies get resolved during deployment so your code runs the same everywhere.

Migration reality: Your Node.js app definitely won't work without changes. I migrated 8 Node apps last year - only 1 worked on the first try. The rest needed 2-4 days each fixing CommonJS imports and API differences.

Here's what breaks when migrating from Node:

• fs.readFile() → crashes with "Forbidden API access" - use Deno.readTextFile()
• process.env.NODE_ENV → throws ReferenceError: process is not defined - use Deno.env.get("NODE_ENV")
• require('./config') → Error: Cannot resolve module './config' - convert to import statements
• Buffer.from() → ReferenceError: Buffer is not defined - use Uint8Array
• __dirname → immediate crash with ReferenceError: __dirname is not defined
• path.join(__dirname, 'file') → use import.meta.resolve('./file') instead

Plan for migration hell. Whatever time estimate you have, triple it. Then double that. I estimated 1 week to migrate a simple Express API and it took 3 weeks because of stupid edge cases like crypto imports that work in Node 16 but break in Deno 1.36.

Production disaster story: Deploy's 512MB memory limit is hard. No gradual slowdown like Node.js - it just fucking dies. I had an API that parsed large CSV uploads crash every time someone uploaded a 100MB file. Error: Memory limit exceeded, isolate terminated. Then it takes 5 minutes to restart because Deploy has to provision a new isolate. Cost me 2 hours of downtime on a Friday night.

Built-in Security Model

Deploy inherits Deno's permission model - everything is locked down by default. No network requests, no env vars, no file system - nothing works until you explicitly allow it. Pain in the ass to configure but at least your code can't accidentally download cryptocurrency miners or read /etc/passwd.

Netlify runs their Edge Functions on Deploy infrastructure and processes 255 million requests daily without getting hacked, so the security model actually works in production. Better than containers where one bad dependency can own your entire server.

Deploy's pricing actually makes sense, unlike AWS where you need a fucking PhD to understand why your static website cost $300 last month.

Free Tier (Actually Generous)

The free tier gives you 1 million requests per month and 100GB bandwidth. That's 30,000+ requests per day before you pay anything. I ran a side project for 8 months on the free tier - never hit the limits.

Free tier includes:

• 1M requests/month (way more generous than Vercel's 100K)
• 100GB bandwidth (careful - this can bite you)
• 20 hours CPU time (plenty for APIs, tight for heavy processing)
• Deno KV included (unlike everyone else charging extra for databases)

Reality check: The bandwidth limit killed me when my blog post about JavaScript went viral. 200GB in one day = $50 overage charge. Lesson learned: use a CDN for images.

Pro Plan ($20/month - Worth It)

$20/month gets you 5 million requests included, then $2 per additional million. I upgraded when my free tier was consistently hitting 3M requests monthly - cheaper than paying overages.

Pro adds:

• 5M requests included (vs 1M free)
• 100 custom domains (vs 50 free)
• 5GB KV storage (vs 1GB free)
• Multi-region KV writes (actually useful for global apps)
• Team members (finally, no more shared login credentials)

Break-even point is around 3-4M requests. I hit Pro limits at 8M monthly requests and the overage was still cheaper than Vercel's equivalent tier.

Enterprise (For When Money Isn't Real)

Enterprise is for companies that need lawyers to approve their coffee vendors. You get compliance checklists longer than a CVS receipt and SOC2 compliance that makes security auditors wet themselves with joy.

Enterprise gets you:

• 99.95% uptime SLA (vs "we try our best" for everyone else)
• Dedicated support that responds in minutes, not days
• Custom compliance reports for your paranoid security team
• Single sign-on because apparently typing passwords is too hard
• Unlimited everything because at Enterprise scale, limits are just suggestions

Pricing is "call us" which means "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." I've seen Enterprise contracts start at $10K/month for Fortune 500 companies processing billions of requests.

The Reality of Deploy Costs (Horror Stories Included)

Deploy's pricing is actually reasonable compared to the competition. 10M requests costs $38/month ($20 base + $18 overage) vs Cloudflare Workers at $50/month.

But the bandwidth will fuck you. $0.50 per GB over your plan limit adds up fast:

• My Product Hunt launch: 300GB in 6 hours = $150 surprise bill
• Client's viral TikTok: 500GB in one day = $250 bandwidth charge
• Image-heavy blog: 50GB monthly average = $25/month extra

KV storage gotchas:

• $0.75 per GiB stored (fine for most apps)
• $2.50 per million write operations (this is where they get you)
• I had debug logging write 2M records in one day = $5 just for logs
• A client stored user analytics in KV and hit $200/month in write costs

When Deploy murders your budget:

• File hosting/downloads (use S3 + CloudFront instead)
• Video streaming (you're insane if you try this)
• Image-heavy sites without CDN (learned this the expensive way)
• Heavy logging to KV (use external logging service)

When it's a steal:

• JSON APIs with minimal bandwidth
• Server-side rendered pages with external assets
• WebSocket apps (most competitors can't even do this)
• TypeScript projects (no build costs vs other platforms)

At least Deploy's billing makes sense. AWS bills look like they were designed by sadistic accountants who enjoy human suffering.