Look, I love Vercel. Or at least, I loved it. When I first discovered their platform, it felt like magic. One-click deployments, previews for every PR, no DevOps headaches... it was a dream come true for a frontend developer like me who just wanted to ship code without dealing with infrastructure nonsense.
But after three years of using Vercel for basically everything, the honeymoon phase is definitely over. The cracks are starting to show, and my wallet is feeling it too.
The "Free" Tier That Isn't Really Free
Let's start with the most obvious issue. Vercel's free tier seems generous at first glance. And it is - if you're building a personal project that nobody uses. But the second your site gains any traction, you'll hit those limits faster than you can say "serverless function timeout."
Last month, I launched what I thought was a simple portfolio site for a friend. Nothing fancy, just a few pages with some images and a contact form. Two weeks in, we hit the serverless function execution limit. Suddenly, the contact form stopped working, and visitors were getting errors. Not exactly the professional look we were going for.
So we upgraded to the Pro plan. $20/month isn't terrible, but it's $20 more than we planned to spend on what's essentially a digital business card.
And that's the thing with Vercel - they get you with the easy start, but the scaling costs can really sneak up on you.
Vendor Lock-in Is Real (And It Hurts)
I didn't think much about vendor lock-in when I started using Vercel. Their developer experience was so good that I figured I'd never want to leave. But now that I'm maintaining several projects with different requirements, the limitations of being tied to their ecosystem are becoming painfully obvious.
Vercel's edge functions? They're great, but they're not AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers. They have their own quirks and limitations that you won't discover until you're deep in production. And once you've built your app around their specific implementation, migrating becomes a massive undertaking.
I found this out the hard way when trying to move a moderately complex Next.js app to a different hosting provider. What should have been a straightforward migration turned into a two-week refactoring nightmare because we'd used so many Vercel-specific features without even realizing it.
The Next.js Relationship Is... Complicated
And speaking of Next.js - let's talk about the elephant in the room. Vercel maintains Next.js, and they make sure it works best on their platform. This makes total business sense for them, but it creates some weird incentives that don't always benefit developers.
Features that would make Next.js more portable or easier to self-host don't seem to get prioritized. Meanwhile, integrations that push you deeper into Vercel's ecosystem get fast-tracked.
Don't get me wrong - Next.js is an amazing framework. But its tight coupling with Vercel means you're often pushed toward architectural decisions that benefit Vercel more than your project.
Those Random Outages Though
This is the part that really gets me. For a premium service that markets itself to businesses, Vercel has had some reliability issues that make me nervous.
Three months ago, we launched a big campaign for a client. Everything was tested, everything looked great. And then, right as the campaign went live, Vercel had a partial outage affecting our region. Our beautiful landing page was returning 500 errors for about 40 minutes. The client was... not happy.
To be fair, every hosting provider has outages. But when your entire deployment pipeline and hosting is with one company, those outages hit harder. With a more traditional setup, we might have had more control or at least more visibility into what was happening.
The Cold Start Problem Is Real
If you're building anything with serverless functions (which is pretty much inevitable with Vercel), you'll eventually run into the cold start problem. Functions that haven't been used recently take longer to spin up, creating noticeable delays for your users.
This wasn't a big deal for most of my projects, but for a recent e-commerce site, those extra seconds on the checkout page were actually impacting conversion rates. Users thought the site was broken when really it was just waiting for a function to warm up.
There are workarounds, sure. But most of them involve either paying more or creating artificial traffic to keep your functions warm. Neither option feels great.
So What Are The Alternatives?
I'm not saying you should abandon Vercel tomorrow. For many projects, it's still a solid choice. But I've started diversifying my hosting strategy based on project needs:
For static sites that need good global performance, Cloudflare Pages has been surprisingly good. Their free tier is genuinely free for most use cases, and their edge network is top-notch.
For more complex apps where I need more control, I've been using a combination of DigitalOcean App Platform and AWS Amplify, depending on the specific requirements. Yes, there's more configuration involved, but the flexibility and predictable pricing make up for it.
For projects where I know scaling might be an issue, I've even gone back to more traditional setups with containers on DigitalOcean or Render. It's not as flashy as serverless, but sometimes boring technology is the most reliable.
The Bottom Line
Vercel isn't bad - it's just not the one-size-fits-all solution it's often made out to be. Their developer experience is still industry-leading, and for certain types of projects, they remain my first choice.
But as your projects grow in complexity or traffic, the hidden costs and limitations become harder to ignore. The platform that makes it easy to get started might not be the best platform to scale with.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't put all your deployment eggs in one Vercel basket. Take the time to understand what your project really needs, both now and in the future. Sometimes the easiest option up front turns out to be the most limiting down the road.
And honestly? A little DevOps knowledge never hurt anyone. Learning how deployment actually works under the hood has made me a better developer, even if it meant stepping outside the comfortable Vercel ecosystem.
