The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed

Funny timing - I was just on a call yesterday about renegotiating our enterprise Vercel contract. The Vercel employees on the call were very friendly, and did share information when prompted, BUT I came away from the call with the understanding that yep, their pricing is intentionally opaque. MIUs are 1 unit = $1, but the rate at which MIU are consumed vary by SKU. Which SKUs do you need, which are you using? Best of luck figuring that out. Cache hit? Fast Data Transfer. Cache miss? Fast Data Transfer _and_ Fast Origin Transfer, so 2x the cost.

For what its worth, they have an internal quoting tool, Copper, which we got a glimpse of on the call. This shows super detailed breakdowns of usage and pricing (for quoting, not actually for billing) and would be really useful to see...but of course they couldn't actually share that information with us.

Anyway, /rant. SaaS pricing being complex and not-exactly-user-friendly is nothing new.

If you couldn't be bothered to write it yourself, why should I read it? The same goes for the overly-complex components that express the same idea over and over again, but somehow without adding any clarity.

I was looking at object storage recently and I hadn't realized how much profit cloud providers drive via egress. And it's so perfectly hidden from the marketing. Ended up going with Cloudflare R2 for free egress.

It's fantastic that they let user purchase SSO as an add-on!

Excellent work - thank you!

I'm not a Vercel fan, but the whole pitch of PaaS is you get more than just a provisioned server for your application. The 20$/month/dev is vercel's own concept of what that Dev Experience costs with a profit margin + average usage fees paid to AWS baked-in. They might leave that average low, but they assume you're here because you like vercel's tooling, not that you're price shopping for $/BitsTx'd. AWS will always win in that, because vercel is also AWS with some dipping mustards they really want you to lock into.

The hobby plan is a loss leader to get developers into the vercel tooling. If you go over the free tier's bandwidth limit, you've exceeded what vercel believes that developer goodwill is worth for a single account. If they allowed you to pay for extra bandwidth on your free plan, it would make vercel look like a crap cloud platform, because all you're doing at that point is paying a premium for AWS, and a kneecapped version of their developer tooling. They really want you to pay the 20$/month/dev and experience everything in vercel's platform because that's their only product. Honestly... no fault to them on that.

Maybe they'd gain some developer positivity about letting you dig your account out of the "exceeding the hobby limits" hole that's easy to fall into, but the AWS cost for them is already spent, and that was all the budget for appeasing you. You'll have to pay them to pay AWS anyway, so they draw a hard line at that point and demand you also pay to use the vercel tooling, which is the only thing they make. (or, in theory, telling you to go pay AWS yourself if the tooling is unimportant to you.)

They will sell you pay-as-you-go services... but only once you pay their 20$: https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

Over all, I hate it. But I don't think there's anything too hidden about it, or at least no more than any other PaaS provider.

This will be the last month of my Vercel Pro Plan for now. I logged into Vercel just now to see what day of the month the billing period ends so I can move any projects or backup metadata before then, and when I clicked it, the page had the title "March 2026: Monthly Pro Plan". Needless to say, the invoice will not be for March, by any stretch. On the same page it says "This invoice will continue updating until the end of your billing period on May 20."

People aren't ranting about Vercel just because of aversions to trends or their marketing style. It's also because it has legitimately been buggy too often. A year ago I commented on HN about some other issues I experienced and that doesn't include weirdness with their open source or AI stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588909

That said, I still think Vercel is a reasonable choice. Just not my top choice right now.

Edit: by the way, remember now.sh? https://x.com/vercel/status/717764348706316288 It's funny that ten years later, there is a similar service with a similar name, exe.dev