Comment by 9dev
1 month ago
Vercel is the cancer of the modern web. The claw into every framework ecosystem and abuse them as sales funnels for their paid plans, pretending they care about open source, competition, and the web.
1 month ago
Vercel is the cancer of the modern web. The claw into every framework ecosystem and abuse them as sales funnels for their paid plans, pretending they care about open source, competition, and the web.
Thank you for the reminder. Not used next.js in years, mental health improved significantly.
Vercel funds and sponsors many open source projects that would otherwise be struggling for funding. Their framework is tailored to the platform they build because that’s a good experience. I don’t currently use them, but people get funneled to their paid plans because it’s a good developer experience. I acknowledge that they are a capitalist enterprise with their own motives, but I think cancer of the modern web is a little strong.
People get funneled to their paid plans out of necessity. While NextJS is open source, the back-end to run it is not. That is where all the complexity lies. Even on Netlify, you run into crazy issues with things like their image stack. It does all this "Optimization" and caching that make it completely impossible to reason about and you run into implementation problems from the providers. Sure you can just run it in a container but then you are taking on all the complexity of NextJS preoptimizations without getting any of them.
Serverless framework attempted to make this stack to run yourself for Next but it is buggy due to the complexity of Next. Open source includes being able to run it. Releasing the framework and funding OSS that also enhances NextJS is nice, but it is a trap because if it comes time to seriously run it, your only option is vercel.
Vercel won the techfluencer space like none other. They get a bad rep largely due to the influencer crowd adjacent to them. Influencers are cancer but an almost necessary one like marketing.
Annoying, obnoxious, and always trying to get your email but god damn do they get your attention.
No. It’s not the influencers, they are just an irrelevant nuisance. It’s the business plan of Vercel, the venture-Capital backed company.
They hire the core contributors of all major web frameworks to continue development under their roof. Suddenly, ongoing improvement of the web platform is largely dependent on the whims of Vercel investors.
They pretend to cater to all hosting providers equally, but just look at Next, which will always be tailored toward Vercel. When will it happen to Nuxt? Sveltekit? Vercel is in a position to make strategic moves across the entire SSR market now. Regardless of whether they make use of that power, it’s bad enough they wield it at all.
When has this ever been a good idea? When has it produced a good outcome? It never has, and it never will.
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I agree, I don't understand the hate in this thread.
And I think their paid hosting was actually really good, up until they switched their $20/month plan to a whatever-it-may-cost and we-send-you-10-cryptic-emails-about-your-usage-every-month plan. That's when they lost me, not because it got more expensive but because it became intransparent and unpredictable and annoying instead of carefree.