Sooooo we're an agency specialized in Next.js stuff.
We're essentially a bunch of passionate engineers but none of us care for ops work including myself, I really want to focus on the code, not on the deployments.
Vercel actually kind of saves us money because the apps we work on are mostly internal tools that don't have millions of requests per minute and developer time is expensive. If vercel saves us one hour of engineering work per month compared to aws it's already cheaper and it definitely saves more than one.
This aligns with my own experience. I do deep backend systems stuff in my day job (just bringing this up to refute the whole "people just don't want to learn Linux" thing, I've even done kernel and eBPF work in the past and can still see value in Vercel), but still support some mostly front end Next.js apps for some small clients from back when I was freelancing.
The vercel ecosystem is perfect for that kind of work. I don't want to (and probably don't have the time) to be managing a bunch of cloud infrastructure for several varied small businesses outside of my day job. I need something where I get a call, go in and make a change, send them a nice preview link to preview the change, then deploy. Vercel makes that kind of business very easy to manage for me, and realistically none of these clients have the kind of traffic where a 100% price difference over managing it yourself would be saving them a lot of money or have a material impact on their finances or my pricing.
My clients get more value from retaining my services this way because I have more free time to help them make actual changes, and less time taken up managing their infra, which they wouldn't see and wouldn't understand and shouldn't have to care about. They pay me a pretty average to below average web guy amount to be their "web guy", not their "server/cloud guy".
If I switched from Vercel and started managing it all myself in AWS or Hetzner or something and trying to pinch pennies, I probably wouldn't be able to substantially lower my prices (time opportunity cost), but I WOULD probably have to drop some clients that have been with me a long time and that I feel some responsibility for.
Things like web scrapers and lots of nodejs bits get caught out by the Vercel limits (like mb of RAM) don't they though? Or is that a thing of the past now?
I say this because, I develop moderately complex applications. We just always end up with some level of server side functionality, and even though Next.js is beautiful, the prevalence of these issues lead up to us self hosting. We do incur occasional issues scaling up, but so far, and despite intense applications with 5 figures of users, had had no issues with single/dual instance set ups. Any running a dockerized next.js application with auto restart is very easy for us.
I emphasize a lot with you - I too hate dev ops. But I suppose that comes from once spending 10 days migrating a service from VPS to AWS (back in the 10s mind - it would be easier now due to the standardization of environments)
But as to next.js features which can be caught out by the vercel resource limits - Do you not encounter those limitations, or do you work around them?
Check out Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Apps for backends.
These have really generous free tiers. 180,000 vCPU seconds/mo, 360,000 GiB seconds/mo, 2m requests/mo. Resets each month.
The trick is that they scale to 0. So you can run a pretty sizable indie project/low volume internal tools for free. I run a bunch of stuff on GCR this way.
i've a script kiddie at best with a lot of half baked projects. I don't want to learn anything about platform / infra / aws. I want to get up into prod as quick as possible and I am finding it super easy with Vercel and Supabase.
We're essentially a bunch of passionate engineers but none of us care for ops work including myself, I really want to focus on the code, not on the deployments.
Vercel actually kind of saves us money because the apps we work on are mostly internal tools that don't have millions of requests per minute and developer time is expensive. If vercel saves us one hour of engineering work per month compared to aws it's already cheaper and it definitely saves more than one.