Comment by jvidalv
3 days ago
This is something I noticed, originally I thought "AI" was the perfect tool for Vercel and Nextjs (current standard = future standard), but then I realized is the total opposite, their moat/stick is gone now, and Rouch that is smart I think knows this.
I switched a middle sized app to Tanstack Router + Vite while I was walking my dogs. Then 30 minuts-1 hour QA and it was done. This should have never happened before AI.
(I did switch because I was tired of the bloated network tab with 100 unnecesary RSC calls, the 5 seconds lag when clicking on an internal link, the 10 seconds "hot reload" after a change... I'm on a M4 MAX with 64GB of ram....)
Vercel's moat is DX in hosting, not NextJS. Consider, people who switch to TanStack Start still need a place to host and many would continue to choose Vercel.
Same principle applies, hosting in Railway has slightly worse UX, but with LLM's you don't need to write a single docker line anymore, so deploying on railway is way way less cumbersome than before, and you gain more control and less costs.
This moat is rapidly disappearing though. Cloudflare is catching up, most apps (including TanStack Start) can be one-click deployed without configuration now.