Vercel

Vercel comes with a bag stuffed with features.
If you do want to start your project as soon as possible, iterate quickly and just ship features, Vercel is the way to go.
Vercel gives you a zero configuration hosting environment, where you just push your code changes and get a preview deployment for each branch you are creating in your repository.

Focus on DX

As mentioned in the intro: the feature set you are able to use is quite enormous.
Compared to self hosted options you e.g. do not have to worry about infrastructure security, how your Next.js application can scale, assets caching, etc.
To name just a few of them:

• DDos Mitigation
• Firewall
• Edge Network: a CDN on steroids 💊
• Image Optimization
• etc ...

No free lunch – Pricing

The pricing of Vercel is quite a chapter. So estimating the costs before hosting on Vercel is almost impossible.
When you do start a new project¹ on Vercel, at the beginning the costs are scaling with the team size (developers and everyone who needs access to Vercel to use the full feature set e.g. commenting on preview deployments) at 20$/month.
Check out this overview of quotas that are included in the Pro plan.

If your are new to Vercel (and serverless in general) this might confuse you more than it does help estimating the monthly costs.

You should know what you are doing

The pricing structure as well as the bills of Vercel are a hot topic on X 🌶️

So this can not be emphasized enough: if your are using Vercel you should know what pitfalls you have to look out for and understand how features you are going to ship are going to infulence your monthly bill.

With this being said, here are some tips on what to look out for:

• Host as little static files as possible

  Bandwidth is expensive with Vercel. So your public directory should better be almost empty. If not, serve those files via a dedicated CDN. Same goes for images.

• Use a dedicated image service

  Using the Vercel image optimization (esp. > 5000 images) is not cheap and it does eat away your bandwidth. Check the Next.js docs for your alternatives or self host your image optimizer.

• Avoid long running serverless functions

  Every serverless function invocation, as well as the function execution time, will eat away your monthly quota or cost you additional money.
  So try to reduce the number of invocations, optimize for execution time (e.g. add timeouts, optimize your DB queries) etc.

• Activate Spend Management

  For pro plans Vercel does offers Spend Management. This enables notifications when certain usage thresholds are reached and pauses your application in the worst case. But for sure sets a cap on monthly expenses.

• ... to be continued

For a deep dive check out the Vercel docs on how to manage and optimze usage.

Conclustion

People give Vercel a harder time than it deserves. They do offer an unmatched developer experience and maybe the high availability and scalability are the exact features you need for your application. However, the above points remain valid.

⁽¹⁾ The hobby plan of Vercel is restricted to "non-commercial, personal use only". We assume you are starting a professional project.