Your team cecil is currently enrolled in the Vercel sponsorship program.
Your 100% off discount is expiring on June 14.
To give you time to handle this transition, we will automatically enroll your team into a $300/mo discount for the next 6 months, starting on June 14 and ending on December 14.
Thank you for partnering together with us.
Please reach out to sponsorships@vercel.com if you have any questions."
Hey there, I work at Vercel. Our sponsorship program has not ended. Some sponsorships have expired like this quoted email, but hopefully 6 months give them time to either re-apply or explore other options.
We haven’t been accepting new sponsorships while we update the existing program, but it’s still running and will accept sponsorships again, soon.
The communication on this is quite confusing. Are you saying that existing participants can apply for renewal? Was this a pre-existing expiration date, or something new? Why would you need to "pause" applications in order to make improvements? Are the "improvements" to benefit Vercel or to benefit open source participants?
It would have been far better to have communicated the answers to these questions up front.
I appreciate Vercels support for open source projects, past and future, and I certainly understand that Vercels support needs to and will evolve overtime. But for Vercels own benefit as well as the benefit of the projects you are supporting, it is important to make these announcements with clarity- and to provide plenty of notice.
You're not giving them 6 months. You're giving them 1 day, before they may end up even seeing the email and getting charged against their will. Even if they do see the email, 1 day is not enough for a change of service notification that would require a migration.
This is disgusting extortioniate behavior that would make me reconsider doing business with Vercel.
If it's only for preview deployments, will the free plan suffice?
Otherwise it's only $20/team member (person who can git push and deploy)/mo, which is still very reasonable for the features they offer.
Otherwise you can set up your own Cloudflare Pages deploys instead, probably under their free plan, or $20/mo for their paid plan. It doesn't have the easy integrations that Vercel has, but you should be able to just set up a build webhook and have it publish a new deploy when you push.
In case it’s helpful to anyone who has to jump off vercel:
I recently had to transition my company off of vercel for reasons unrelated to this (wanted to use cloud infra primitives that vercel does not provide, and wanted to leverage the large amount of AWS credits my company received) and found sst.dev [0] to be easy to migrate to and a joy to use in general. It leverages open-next to deploy next.js projects on AWS in a serverless way.
I’ve been enjoying using it so much that for my next project I think I’ll skip vercel altogether and use sst from the start.
Heads up that vercel updated the copy on the page that's linked to by this post. It's not a blog post, it's a guide page, so obviously we'd expect it to change, but it's probably useful to track it in case comments here are responding to an older version.
Seems like it's mainly an update to clarify things because of this thread. But honestly, they'd probably be better off just making a new post explaining what's going on. They might also want to clarify why some sponsorships seem to have coincidentally expired right around now (if that's what's happening), and what's up with this $300 credit thing.
Correct, I updated this page – the title of this HN post is misleading. Nowhere in the original guide did it mention anything related to the title, causing confusion in this thread.
Vercel sponsored my project (https://github.com/huhu/rust-search-extension) since 2020, and I also received their email yesterday. I sent a email try to ask the reason, and get no response yet.
There are 3 problems with this approach that make Vercel / Netlify much better options:
1. People delude themselves into thinking that they have the magic unicorn project that will blow up to a million users in 1 day.
2. People are out of touch with how fast computers are these days, and don't realize that a single server can handle a huge amount of traffic.
3. People lack the skills to build out their own infra in a time efficient way. With all the tools and free knowledge we have today, it is trivial to set up a small network of small servers around the world for a small business. People lack the skills to do this, pay too much for cloud compute, then justify it to themselves that "it's cheaper than engineer time" - when in reality, if they were better engineers, it wouldn't take a lot of engineer time.
3. People greatly over estimate the amount of work it takes to setup a vps, especially with a OS deployment service like Coolify and the like. Takes less than an hour. You act like it’s a full time job when unless you’re app has completely blown up, it’s set once and forget.
I received the email for maglit.me yesterday. It's sad to see it ending as my project has proven itself to be useful to people and open source community.
I'm thinking of applying to Netlify's sponsorship program or just hosting the website using Coolify on VPS, it'll cost money which would mean I'd have to ask the users for donations to make the project sustainable.
You seem to be doing server-side encryption? I guess "Encrypted" is technically true but since your server/vercel sees the clear URL and password it's not terribly useful.
You also send all URLs to Google? It would be nice if you at least used the offline safebrowsing database instead!
That safe browsing thing is more recent. I was receiving so many requests from the Italian government that I had to do something quick, otherwise they'd have shut the website down.
As for the logs, vercel only has runtime logs. I do not store them. This is why it’s “privacy respecting” and not “privacy protecting” because maglit is not supposed to be the end all be all for privacy but It does have some nice security and privacy features for a FOSS project.
The amount of scammers that used it before the safe browsing check was insane. People used to message me about how some links were being used to create fake links for their profiles and what not.
At some point, the piper will come for companies that rely so heavily on open-source software they do not themselves financially support or contribute to.
Well, Vercel at least maintains the open-source Next.js, which is a pretty important framework for a lot of us. And they provide a generous free and Teams plan for small teams and individual devs that just need to spin something up with minimal fuss.
I'm biased (as a frontend dev who really appreciates what they've abstracted and simplified), but IMO they and Cloudflare have been the two companies really driving the Web forward as an app platform, where AWS and Google and Azure have stalled.
The piper has come and gone several times. Solarwinds, left-pad, xz-utils, we can keep going here. We can holler all we want about corporations handle open source so irresponsibly, but at the end of the day they don't care unless there is a lasting impact on their bottom line.
It has. It continues to do so. Look no further than the plethora of issues surrounding supply chain security. Or the recent attempts at legislating OSS maintainer obligations.
Seems they are trying to play it cool on the web, calling it a "pause" etc. It seems they're just scrapping it entirely and want to deliver the bad news via email to those affected.
Then I think they should submit the email (e.g. in a pastebin or Google doc or something). Not misrepresent the contents of this page.
First, editorializing the submission titles is against HN policies. Second, it'd let us see the actual communication from Vercel rather than a paraphrase.
Revenue is no match for throwing massive bags of money at the marketing bonfire. Subsidizing open-source projects is ultimately a marketing spend - sounds like the marketing budget is getting cut.
Thats the whole game. The founders have already made shit tons of money. I see the CEO investing in a ton of other companies. All while building a loss making company. It really is the equivalent of selling 100 dollars for 99 while pocketing shit tons of money on the side.
Is next js good? Sure. But so was jquery back in the day and they didn't need the 250 million in cash to burn through.
They closed $250M in funding about a month ago. Feels more like new investors want a healthier balance sheet for possible IPO or just redirect cash flow - probably with the goal to dump more resources into AI (which they likely promised to do while fundraising).
I wonder if negotiating with Cara on their $98k bill which got some press caused them to need to recoup costs elsewhere. (Just a wild guess based on the timing.)
Idk what you mean by the link, or the <s>, or what you don't know anymore, or what we can decide in this matter, or really what the matter at hand is, at all.
Focusing on the article:
Is there something I missed? Or did I get it right after reading 2x, and it really is just a random blog from 2 years ago advocating for bigcos to reduce headcount? If so, is that related in any way to Vercel cutting their sponsorship program for hosting for open source projects?
I have been sponsored by Vercel since early 2020. Vercel has primarily served as a CDN for my free and open-source font delivery system, using up to a couple hundred gigabytes of bandwidth per month. Luckily I've been using a custom domain for these deployments so migrating platforms should be easy!
Does anyone have any recommendations for a CDN service that may be interested in sponsoring this type of project? I suppose it's possible to just use Cloudflare's free tier, but I'd like to avoid contributing to internet monopolies as much as possible.
I found somebody on twitter posting their email
https://x.com/ArnaudLigny/status/1801536871962489145
"Hey there,
Your team cecil is currently enrolled in the Vercel sponsorship program.
Your 100% off discount is expiring on June 14.
To give you time to handle this transition, we will automatically enroll your team into a $300/mo discount for the next 6 months, starting on June 14 and ending on December 14.
Thank you for partnering together with us.
Please reach out to sponsorships@vercel.com if you have any questions."
Hey there, I work at Vercel. Our sponsorship program has not ended. Some sponsorships have expired like this quoted email, but hopefully 6 months give them time to either re-apply or explore other options.
We haven’t been accepting new sponsorships while we update the existing program, but it’s still running and will accept sponsorships again, soon.
The communication on this is quite confusing. Are you saying that existing participants can apply for renewal? Was this a pre-existing expiration date, or something new? Why would you need to "pause" applications in order to make improvements? Are the "improvements" to benefit Vercel or to benefit open source participants?
It would have been far better to have communicated the answers to these questions up front.
I appreciate Vercels support for open source projects, past and future, and I certainly understand that Vercels support needs to and will evolve overtime. But for Vercels own benefit as well as the benefit of the projects you are supporting, it is important to make these announcements with clarity- and to provide plenty of notice.
You're not giving them 6 months. You're giving them 1 day, before they may end up even seeing the email and getting charged against their will. Even if they do see the email, 1 day is not enough for a change of service notification that would require a migration.
This is disgusting extortioniate behavior that would make me reconsider doing business with Vercel.
4 replies →
Thank you for this context.
Giving a bunch of projects $300 a month in credits for six months is still far more than nearly any company does.
I wonder if they had projects legitimately consuming more than $300 a month of their services.
So nice of Vercel. As if their cash cow wasn’t one of those ‘sponsored’ projects. Just wait to see what they will do to svelte
At least their extortion is polite?
How is this extortion? 6 months is plenty of time to sort out an alternative if you need to (assuming an alternative is available).
3 replies →
We received an email yesterday saying the "100% discount is expiring on June 14".
We're using them for deploy previews. Does anyone have recommendations on alternatives?
Netlify CEO here.
We've had a few open source plan since the early days and it's not going anywhere.
https://www.netlify.com/legal/open-source-policy/
The Vercel open source plan is also not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
2 replies →
Google Cloud Run also has PR previews
Fly.io has a GitHub action to make it pretty easy
Netlify or Cloudflare perhaps. I would think most platforms could handle that by now. Both Cloudflare and Netlify work for me in that scenario.
I'm on the DevRel team at Cloudflare. Definitely happy to help personally with anyone who needs help migrating. My email is in my profile.
And we have an OSS sponsorship program: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-new-oss-sponsorships-...
3 replies →
Self hosted coolify[0], very easy to set up IMO
[0]: https://coolify.io/
If it is important to your business for deployment staging, then why not just pay Vercel?
Who said anything about a business?
I guess you missed all the negative reviews in this thread?
I'm currently giving https://piku.github.io/ a go and it's working well, but this is just for hobby projects.
If it's only for preview deployments, will the free plan suffice?
Otherwise it's only $20/team member (person who can git push and deploy)/mo, which is still very reasonable for the features they offer.
Otherwise you can set up your own Cloudflare Pages deploys instead, probably under their free plan, or $20/mo for their paid plan. It doesn't have the easy integrations that Vercel has, but you should be able to just set up a build webhook and have it publish a new deploy when you push.
If you’re comfortable with k8s there is no cheaper deal in town than Rackspace Spot.
I've been using Koyeb pretty seamlessly
Cloudflare?
In case it’s helpful to anyone who has to jump off vercel:
I recently had to transition my company off of vercel for reasons unrelated to this (wanted to use cloud infra primitives that vercel does not provide, and wanted to leverage the large amount of AWS credits my company received) and found sst.dev [0] to be easy to migrate to and a joy to use in general. It leverages open-next to deploy next.js projects on AWS in a serverless way.
I’ve been enjoying using it so much that for my next project I think I’ll skip vercel altogether and use sst from the start.
[0] https://sst.dev/
AWS Amplify Gen 2 supports Next.JS App Router finally. Not saying it's better or worse than SST/vercel, just saying it's also an option finally.
https://docs.amplify.aws/nextjs/build-a-backend/server-side-...
Heads up that vercel updated the copy on the page that's linked to by this post. It's not a blog post, it's a guide page, so obviously we'd expect it to change, but it's probably useful to track it in case comments here are responding to an older version.
This is what it originally said: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614182520/https://vercel.co...
Here's what it says at the time I'm posting this: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614223830/https://vercel.co...
Seems like it's mainly an update to clarify things because of this thread. But honestly, they'd probably be better off just making a new post explaining what's going on. They might also want to clarify why some sponsorships seem to have coincidentally expired right around now (if that's what's happening), and what's up with this $300 credit thing.
Correct, I updated this page – the title of this HN post is misleading. Nowhere in the original guide did it mention anything related to the title, causing confusion in this thread.
We are not ending the program, clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
Your interjections in this thread is what is misleading. Let the people talk, you are on Vercel's payroll, the only one with a biased opinion here.
4 replies →
Vercel sponsored my project (https://github.com/huhu/rust-search-extension) since 2020, and I also received their email yesterday. I sent a email try to ask the reason, and get no response yet.
That looks like a static site to me, should be OK with the free plan at Vercel/Cloudflare/other?
Yes, not a big impact to my project, I plan migrate to Github Pages.
Get a machine from hetzner and use coolify or something similar and own your work. Here’s a great video from just 3 days ago: https://youtu.be/ZZ1lnw8D3Qo?si=ggzm9Znhz9HLwaSa
There are 3 problems with this approach that make Vercel / Netlify much better options:
1. People delude themselves into thinking that they have the magic unicorn project that will blow up to a million users in 1 day.
2. People are out of touch with how fast computers are these days, and don't realize that a single server can handle a huge amount of traffic.
3. People lack the skills to build out their own infra in a time efficient way. With all the tools and free knowledge we have today, it is trivial to set up a small network of small servers around the world for a small business. People lack the skills to do this, pay too much for cloud compute, then justify it to themselves that "it's cheaper than engineer time" - when in reality, if they were better engineers, it wouldn't take a lot of engineer time.
The first two don’t negate a vps option.
3. People greatly over estimate the amount of work it takes to setup a vps, especially with a OS deployment service like Coolify and the like. Takes less than an hour. You act like it’s a full time job when unless you’re app has completely blown up, it’s set once and forget.
1 reply →
I received the email for maglit.me yesterday. It's sad to see it ending as my project has proven itself to be useful to people and open source community.
I'm thinking of applying to Netlify's sponsorship program or just hosting the website using Coolify on VPS, it'll cost money which would mean I'd have to ask the users for donations to make the project sustainable.
> Privacy Respecting Encrypted Link Shortener
You seem to be doing server-side encryption? I guess "Encrypted" is technically true but since your server/vercel sees the clear URL and password it's not terribly useful.
You also send all URLs to Google? It would be nice if you at least used the offline safebrowsing database instead!
That safe browsing thing is more recent. I was receiving so many requests from the Italian government that I had to do something quick, otherwise they'd have shut the website down.
As for the logs, vercel only has runtime logs. I do not store them. This is why it’s “privacy respecting” and not “privacy protecting” because maglit is not supposed to be the end all be all for privacy but It does have some nice security and privacy features for a FOSS project.
The amount of scammers that used it before the safe browsing check was insane. People used to message me about how some links were being used to create fake links for their profiles and what not.
At some point, the piper will come for companies that rely so heavily on open-source software they do not themselves financially support or contribute to.
Well, Vercel at least maintains the open-source Next.js, which is a pretty important framework for a lot of us. And they provide a generous free and Teams plan for small teams and individual devs that just need to spin something up with minimal fuss.
I'm biased (as a frontend dev who really appreciates what they've abstracted and simplified), but IMO they and Cloudflare have been the two companies really driving the Web forward as an app platform, where AWS and Google and Azure have stalled.
The piper has come and gone several times. Solarwinds, left-pad, xz-utils, we can keep going here. We can holler all we want about corporations handle open source so irresponsibly, but at the end of the day they don't care unless there is a lasting impact on their bottom line.
It has. It continues to do so. Look no further than the plethora of issues surrounding supply chain security. Or the recent attempts at legislating OSS maintainer obligations.
> supply chain security
https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier
"You are not buying from a supplier, you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code."
How is the submitted article related to the headline? There's no claim of a "24hr notice" there, just that new sponsorships aren't being accepted.
Seems they are trying to play it cool on the web, calling it a "pause" etc. It seems they're just scrapping it entirely and want to deliver the bad news via email to those affected.
One of their staff (the VP of Product) responded with a clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
The 24hr notice is mentioned by OP in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682720
Then I think they should submit the email (e.g. in a pastebin or Google doc or something). Not misrepresent the contents of this page.
First, editorializing the submission titles is against HN policies. Second, it'd let us see the actual communication from Vercel rather than a paraphrase.
3 replies →
See other comments.
Vercel did well to support to open source projects so far but I guess it's time for the work on their bottom line.
This is why I am vary of free credits.
The program still exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
They did not “did well”. They hurt open source much more than give back to the community. VC-backed ‘open source’ is a virus
I guess they’re facing severe financial strain
Wait, so Vercel is not profitable?
How tf? They're the most overpriced product I pay for (and I like it, no complains).
Revenue is no match for throwing massive bags of money at the marketing bonfire. Subsidizing open-source projects is ultimately a marketing spend - sounds like the marketing budget is getting cut.
6 replies →
Thats the whole game. The founders have already made shit tons of money. I see the CEO investing in a ton of other companies. All while building a loss making company. It really is the equivalent of selling 100 dollars for 99 while pocketing shit tons of money on the side.
Is next js good? Sure. But so was jquery back in the day and they didn't need the 250 million in cash to burn through.
They closed $250M in funding about a month ago. Feels more like new investors want a healthier balance sheet for possible IPO or just redirect cash flow - probably with the goal to dump more resources into AI (which they likely promised to do while fundraising).
source for vercel series E which AFAIK they have not announced https://x.com/ilyasu/status/1791182579837829199?s=46&t=90xQ8...
I wonder if negotiating with Cara on their $98k bill which got some press caused them to need to recoup costs elsewhere. (Just a wild guess based on the timing.)
https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/06/vercel-serverless-scale-e...
https://medium.com/@alt.cap/time-to-get-fit-an-open-letter-f... /s. Or no /s? idk anymore. You decide.
VC money hose is drying up I suppose
“VC Money Hose” has been redirected to anything with AI in the name. “Vercel, powered by AI” would receive plenty of funding. ;)
2 replies →
Idk what you mean by the link, or the <s>, or what you don't know anymore, or what we can decide in this matter, or really what the matter at hand is, at all.
Focusing on the article:
Is there something I missed? Or did I get it right after reading 2x, and it really is just a random blog from 2 years ago advocating for bigcos to reduce headcount? If so, is that related in any way to Vercel cutting their sponsorship program for hosting for open source projects?
1 reply →
I have been sponsored by Vercel since early 2020. Vercel has primarily served as a CDN for my free and open-source font delivery system, using up to a couple hundred gigabytes of bandwidth per month. Luckily I've been using a custom domain for these deployments so migrating platforms should be easy!
Does anyone have any recommendations for a CDN service that may be interested in sponsoring this type of project? I suppose it's possible to just use Cloudflare's free tier, but I'd like to avoid contributing to internet monopolies as much as possible.
I have seen Cloudflare free plans moving terabytes of data each month, so I don't exactly see a problem.
Cloudflare also has an OSS sponsorship and I don't see them giving a 1 day termination notice.
Ps. They aren't a monopoly. There are plenty of cloud services competing.
With the amount of money vercel makes with react, nobody should see those ‘sponsorships’ as anything other than predatory market tactic
I am grateful that they had an open source sponsorship program until now.
If you're looking to host documentation, Read the Docs has been hosting docs for open source projects for 15 years now (I'm one of the co-founders).
We put a small, ethical ad on your docs pages as tradeoff, and to make it sustainable, along with hosting credits from AWS (Thanks AWS!).
We're happy to help host docs if that's what you're looking for: https://about.readthedocs.com/pricing/#/community