What are the benefits of using Vercel for web development and how does its UX/UI compare to other similar products?

We actually almost switched to Netlify because Vercel's so stupid expensive. We pay more for Vercel than we do for some other really core infrastructure. It's pretty stupid because all they do is build your JavaScript and then host it. But it's a lot of little things that start compounding and become just easier not to change, basically. So Netlify is significantly cheaper, but the onboarding, the development UX, just getting started -- there's enough friction where it doesn't make sense to do. They haven’t developed or optimized around that kind of interface.

The way that we use Vercel, it's really just a commodity for hosting. We could do it ourselves, but there are little things that become easy. For example, they integrate with GitHub; they build your package; they deploy it; they let you rollback; they let you have previews of different packages, different bundles that are pull requests and whatnot; they manage your environment variables; they manage access between teams. That kind of stuff starts to add up. It's interesting, because five years ago it was very unusual to be able to build a pull request and have a preview branched together. Infrastructure-wise, that was hard to do. Now you take it for granted. We don't even use that feature that much, but just the fact that it's there is nice. Being able to not have to set up Jenkins or some kind of build runner and just have that work is quite nice, relative to how things worked five years ago or probably how things still work at Google or something.

“Would we try something else?” Yeah. There are tools like render.com. There's a number of emerging tools that are trying to simplify infrastructure management. is one that has good publicity around what they do. But they're all pretty much providing the same thing, which is, “Let us take your Git repo. We'll follow the instructions on how to build it. We can detect if it's a React app or Next app or something. Then we'll handle the routing so that it's available.” What's cool about Vercel is they're trying to differentiate themselves by building Next and then building APIs that integrate only with Vercel. That's smart on their side. They're basically creating defensibility for something that is just a commodity. They provide analytics and stuff like that, but my guess is those APIs are technically accessible anywhere else, but because they're building it, they can do these things that other people can't do as quickly.