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Comment by moralestapia

10 months ago

Wait, so Vercel is not profitable?

How tf? They're the most overpriced product I pay for (and I like it, no complains).

8 comments

moralestapia

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solatic  10 months ago

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.

  • mananaysiempre  10 months ago

    Unlike other kinds of marketing, though, you can get a lot of bad press for cutting the budget for this one.

    • epolanski  10 months ago

      Is it fair though?

      While I think them ending support from a day to another is terrible (should've given much more time to address it) at the end of the day they have put lots of money in open source ecosystem and hired plenty of devs to work on their own projects (not even Vercel's).

      1 reply →

  • sdesol  10 months ago

    > Subsidizing open-source projects is ultimately a marketing spend

    They say 2M in Vercel credits. How much is that in actual money?

    • solatic  10 months ago

      Credits isn't the same thing as either revenue or costs. Look at kids pirating Photoshop and Maya to learn the tools and make cool shit - that's not really lost revenue, because kids just don't have that kind of money to spend on professional tools to begin with. Most open source projects taking Vercel credits don't have the money to pay Vercel in the absence of credits, so this doesn't result in lost revenue. And it's not the same as costs, because if it did, then Vercel wouldn't be making a profit.

      The only reasonable way to track this is to understand how much each customer costs (in servers, hardware, etc) and internally attribute those costs to marketing instead of revenue.

ilrwbwrkhv  10 months ago

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.