AWS breadth vs Vercel developer experience
Thom Krupa, co-founder of Bejamas, on building dynamic apps on the Jamstack
This reveals that AWS wins by breadth, while Vercel and Netlify win by removing setup work. AWS gives a team the raw parts for almost any web stack, storage in S3, delivery through CloudFront, serverless compute, machine learning, video, and more. Vercel packages the common frontend path into one workflow, so a developer connects a repo, deploys, and gets routing, compute, CDN, and previews without stitching the parts together.
-
The main reason to move from Vercel to AWS is usually not scale. It is stack control. Teams already using AWS elsewhere often want one vendor, shared security rules, and direct access to adjacent services like ML, media, or custom infrastructure.
-
The tradeoff is labor. On AWS, the closest managed Jamstack style option is Amplify, but custom setups still need someone who knows AWS deeply enough to wire services together and keep them working. Vercel is effectively selling outsourced DevOps for frontend teams.
-
That is why AWS is hard to beat on products but easier to beat on experience. Vercel grew by wrapping AWS primitives in opinionated defaults tied closely to Next.js, then monetizing seats and usage on top of the underlying compute, bandwidth, and storage.
Going forward, the market keeps splitting in two. AWS will remain the place enterprises go when they want every cloud service under one roof, while Vercel and similar platforms keep moving up by making more of the stack feel automatic. The winner in each account will depend on whether the bottleneck is infrastructure flexibility or developer time.