Comment by senko
1 day ago
You use a free template that's done in Next.js and uses its Image component, so you need a server.
Everything runs fine locally until you try to deploy it, and bam you need 4g ram machine to run the thing.
So you host it on Vercel for free cause it's easy!
Then you want to check for more than 30 seconds of analytics, and it's pay time.
I am not following the logic. If you’re a hobbyist, sure.
But the argument is if you’re using Vercel for production, you’re paying 5-10x what you’d pay for a VM, with 4gb.
So then what’s the rationale? You can’t be a hobbyist but also “it’s pay time” for production?
Vercel promises to engineer the pain away when it comes to deployment. The thing however is that Vercel introduced that pain in the first place by writing sub-par documentation and splitting many of NextJS functions into small parts with different cost.
Perhaps the rationale is laziness. Maintaining VM probably takes some more effort and competence than deploying to Vercel. Some people are willing to pay to minimize effort and the need to learn anything.
Vercel auto creates deployments on pushes to branches. That was a super useful feature in beta testing web stuff.