Comment by theturtletalks
1 day ago
Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.
What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.
Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.
So it is vendor locked by Vercel. That's why there is OpenNext - https://opennext.js.org/
How is it vendor locked?
Recent features are more dependent on Vercel and it's OpenNext that makes it platform independent with adapters.