Websites and hosting decision
Vercel
A competent developer can reproduce a basic deploy+CDN+serverless workflow; the full Vercel experience (fluid compute, AI gateway, security add-ons, global orchestration and polish) is costly to replicate, so keep paying if you need those features.
Visit website↗$20/mo
$240/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$25/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Vercel alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Vercel publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
- vercel/next.js★141,660 GitHub starsMITThe React Framework↗
- vercel/hyper★44,685 GitHub starsMITA terminal built on web technologies↗
- vercel/swr★32,447 GitHub starsMITReact Hooks for Data Fetching↗
- vercel/turborepo★30,866 GitHub starsMITBuild system optimized for JavaScript and TypeScript, written in Rust↗
What a replacement has to do
- Provide continuous deploys from a Git repo to a global CDN with serverless function execution and basic observability (deploy, preview, rollback).
What it still won’t have
- Fluid Compute / Active-CPU billing and integrated serverless platform
- AI Gateway, Agent Stack, and Sandbox features
- Built-in global deployment orchestration and tenant isolation
- Managed WAF, Bot Management, BotID and advanced security add-ons
- Integrated preview environments, toolbar comments, and one-click rollbacks with Vercel polish
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Ship apps that scale from zero to millions instantly
- Execution quality
Vercel handles infrastructure automatically and provides these tools to help you deploy and scale:
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted Vercel-like deploy platform using: GitHub Actions, Node.js for build hooks, AWS S3 + CloudFront for static assets, AWS Lambda + API Gateway for serverless functions, Postgres (or SQLite) for deployment metadata, and CloudWatch/ELK for logs. In scope: Git->CI pipeline, artifact publish to S3, CloudFront distribution with invalidation, Lambda endpoints wired to routes, a small web dashboard to show current deployment, preview URLs for pull requests, automatic rollback to last successful deploy, and basic request logging and health checks. Out of scope: agentic AI features (AI Gateway, Sandbox, Agent Stack), advanced WAF/Bot management, multi-tenant enterprise features, and deep observability dashboards. Include input validation, retries, error handling for builds/deploys, and unit/integration tests for CI hooks, upload, and function invocation paths.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productVercel — official product
- official pricingVercel Pricing
- official docsVercel Docs
- open sourcecoollabsio/coolify
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
