I always feel a bit confused when seeing people discuss VC-funded hosting providers like Heroku, Vercel, Render, etc.
Many people remember moving off Heroku, but few seem to realize that the "new" providers are going to have the same period of increased costs, backlash, and settling in to just working with the big fish that can't or won't justify moving. So any discussion about how Vercel or Render or whoever is better just feels like missing the point.
The one thing I'll say is that a company like Vercel is definitely making a reasonable bet by trying to control the software as much as possible as well as the hardware. I find it unfortunate.
I think people don’t care about Herokus costs, because for a long time Heroku was basically the best setup for a certain kind of simple app, and had lots of wonderful goodies around it.
Every alternative seems to be pitching some different thing (the oddest to me is Fly with its edge computing stuff… I legit wonder how many projects at Fly go beyond like 2 machines let alone do all the fancy stuff), meanwhile “charge a bunch of people 100 bucks a month for 20 bucks of compute” seems to be where Heroku really thrived.
Many people remember moving off Heroku, but few seem to realize that the "new" providers are going to have the same period of increased costs, backlash, and settling in to just working with the big fish that can't or won't justify moving. So any discussion about how Vercel or Render or whoever is better just feels like missing the point.
The one thing I'll say is that a company like Vercel is definitely making a reasonable bet by trying to control the software as much as possible as well as the hardware. I find it unfortunate.