Vercel Review

Vercel's pitch is that deployment should be invisible, and for a frontend it is: connect a repository and every push builds, deploys and gets its own preview URL, with the production domain, TLS and CDN handled without a single configuration file. Because the company builds Next.js, that framework runs better here than anywhere, with image optimisation, incremental regeneration and edge rendering that other hosts have to approximate.

The developer experience is the best in the category. The price is the argument against. The free tier is generous for a hobby and the Pro tier is fair for a small team, but usage charges for bandwidth, functions and images scale in ways that have produced famous invoices, and a site that grows beyond a certain point is usually cheaper elsewhere. There is also the quiet cost of building on a platform whose best features only work on that platform. For most teams the trade is worth it until the day it is not.