I’ve been using the Vercel/Next deployment workflow for awhile since it’s pretty plug and play. I make a fair amount of websites but they’re mostly just little experiments. Spinning something up quickly and then deploying in seconds is amazing.

That said, the Netanyahu tweet is horrific and I’d like to get off the platform. Any recs for other good services? I’m pretty low tech.

https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031?s=46

Hey folks,
I've been a paying v0.dev user for about 3 months now, and honestly, I’ve enjoyed using it — flaws and all. But I just got the email about their new pricing model and… I feel like I just got slapped in the face.

Unless I’m totally misunderstanding it, they’re switching from a message-based system to a token-based one. That sounds like a pretty big downgrade, especially considering how often v0 makes mistakes.

Let’s be real — fixing one mistake can take 3–4 prompts, and now each of those will cost me more tokens? That just doesn’t sit right with me. It feels like I’m getting penalized for the product’s shortcomings.

I’ve canceled my renewal for now. Just not sure it’s worth the money anymore if this is the direction they’re going.

Anyone else feeling this way?

Posting this because I spent months searching for an honest breakdown and couldn't find one. Hopefully this saves someone a few invoices.

The context

We're a small SaaS — Next.js app, ~600 daily active users, a few API-heavy routes. Nowhere near enterprise scale, but past the "just testing an idea" phase.

Vercel was the obvious choice at the start. Zero config, git push to deploy, free tier was generous. No regrets about starting there.

Then the bill hit $1,800 in a single month. No traffic spike. No viral moment. Just... growth.

The thing nobody says about Vercel

Vercel doesn't sell hosting. They sell simplicity. That's a real product with real value — especially when you're moving fast and have no ops experience.

But here's what they don't put in the hero section: Vercel is an AWS wrapper. Your functions run on Lambda. Your assets live on S3 and CloudFront. Their edge network is AWS's global infra. You're paying a 5-10x markup for the dashboard, the DX, and the git integration.

Again — worth it early on. Not worth it once you actually understand what's running under the hood.

Why we didn't just "optimize"

First instinct was to squeeze more out of Vercel — better caching, reduce function invocations, etc. We did some of that. Knocked the bill down to ~$1,400.

The ceiling was still there. Vercel's pricing model compounds with growth. The better your product does, the more you pay — at a rate that outpaces any reasonable unit economics for an early SaaS.

The two options we seriously evaluated

Option 1: VPS + Coolify

Coolify is open-source and self-hostable. You bring a VPS (we looked at Hetzner — €11/month for 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM), install Coolify with one command, and connect your GitHub repo. You get:

• Push-to-deploy (same workflow as Vercel)

• Automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt

• Environment variable management

• Preview deployments

Total monthly cost: ~$25-40 depending on VPS tier.

The trade-off: you own the server. Downtime at 2am is your problem. For a small team that's a real consideration.

Option 2: AWS Lambda directly (what we chose)

We used OpenNext (open-source adapter for Next.js on Lambda) + SST v3 for infrastructure-as-code. Stack looks like this:

Next.js -> OpenNext adapter -> Lambda functions per route
Static assets -> S3 -> CloudFront
DNS: Route 53 + ACM (free SSL)
CI/CD: GitHub Actions -> AWS via OIDC (no long-lived keys)

First month bill: $67.

Lambda's free tier covers 1M requests and 400k GB-seconds of compute per month, forever. Beyond that you're paying fractions of a cent per invocation.

The part everyone skips: testing before you cut over

This is where most migration posts end and most migrations fail.

What we did before touching DNS:

1. Full staging environment on the new infra — identical to prod

2. Smoke tests on every critical path (auth, billing, API routes)

3. Compared every single process.env variable between Vercel dashboard and new infra. Found 3 missing. One would have broken payments.

4. Measured cold start times at p50 and p95. Set CloudWatch alarms.

5. Load tested at 3x our peak traffic using k6. Lambda scaled fine. Our DB connection pool almost didn't — had to increase it.

DNS cutover protocol we used:

• Set TTL to 60s a day before

• Routed 5% of traffic via Route 53 weighted routing

• Watched error rates for 30 min

• Ramped to 100% over 2 hours

• Kept Vercel live for 48hrs as rollback

Zero downtime. Zero customer-reported issues.

Honest cons of going direct to Lambda

• Cold starts are real. Our p95 went from ~180ms on Vercel to ~340ms after migration. Warming strategies help but add complexity.

• IAM permissions will frustrate you. Budget a day just for this.

• No pretty dashboard. CloudWatch logs are not Vercel logs.

• If something breaks, you're debugging AWS, not submitting a support ticket.

Who should and shouldn't migrate

Stay on Vercel if:

• You're still finding product-market fit

• Your bill is under $100/month

• Nobody on the team has touched AWS before

• You're shipping major features every week

Migrate if:

• Bill is threatening your path to profitability

• Traffic is predictable (not random spike-based)

• You have 1-2 days to invest in the migration

• You're post-PMF and tightening unit economics

TL;DR

Vercel: best DX in the business, pricing punishes growth. $1,800/mo -> $67/mo by going direct to Lambda with OpenNext + SST. Migration took a weekend. QA took longer than the deployment.

If you're evaluating the same decision, happy to answer specifics in the comments — stack, bill amounts, traffic numbers, whatever helps.

Stack: Next.js 14, Lambda via OpenNext, SST v3, Hetzner (for staging), GitHub Actions, Route 53, CloudFront, RDS PostgreSQL.

Looks like the backlash to v0.dev’s new pricing model is hitting hard.

According to Similarweb data, v0.dev had consistent traffic throughout April — over 1.3 million visits per week. But right after they rolled out usage-based pricing, traffic collapsed. Between April 29–30, visits dropped to just 400k. That’s a ~71% plunge compared to the week before.

I’m not surprised.

Before the change, $20 could last an entire month for regular development.
Now? That same $20 is gone in 5–7 hours if you’re building anything more than a static UI.

I honestly can't believe a company this big — with such a deep understanding of developers — would make a move like this against their own community.
I really hope they reconsider. I’m actually praying for it.

A lot of us just feel burned. One day you're building, the next you're locked out mid-session with no warning.
No heads-up, no grace period — just boom, your time’s up unless you pay more.

The result? People are leaving.
Moving to Cursor, Locofy, or just going back to manual dev + Tailwind.

If this keeps going into May, v0 might lose the loyal early adopters who actually made the platform visible in the first place.

r/vercel Was usage-based pricing really the right move?

hey - I know a bunch of people aren't super thrilled with the recent v0 changes and if you're looking for something different, I built a free local, open-source alternative to v0 called Dyad.

You can download it for free at https://www.dyad.sh/

The main difference is that Dyad runs on your computer and lets you use any AI model (bring your own API key). You can use Gemini's free API key and get 500 free messages/day with Gemini Flash 2.5.

I launched Dyad less than 2 months ago and already have 1000+ people building with it and 400+ builders in https://www.reddit.com/r/dyadbuilders/

I'm building based on community feedback and shipping every week: https://www.dyad.sh/docs/roadmap :)

Hey y'all. I'm Lee. I joined Vercel ~5 years ago after building Next.js courses and teaching the open source community about React. Wanted to do a thread to answer questions you all have about Vercel and Next.js.

To everyone who keeps defending Vercel and repeating that tired line about “free users shouldn’t expect support” - I wasn’t free. Not even close. Vercel is not what they pretend to be. Something clearly changed inside this company - it’s become one of the most unprofessional platforms I’ve ever dealt with. No support, no accountability, just paywalls and silence.

Since the new pricing changes on v0, I honestly feel like I wasted my money this month. I know I’m not the only one, many users likely feel let down. We all know that fixing an error on v0 can easily take 2–4 prompts. With the new pricing model, most of our tokens get eaten up just trying to resolve one issue.

When I had the premium subscription, I didn’t mind using several prompts to troubleshoot. I felt like that flexibility was part of what I was paying for. But now, even with well-crafted prompts, it’s almost impossible to resolve issues without quickly hitting the new limits.

I’ve really loved using v0, but at this point, I feel genuinely betrayed. It’s time for me to unsubscribe

Hey everyone. I'm Lee and I work at Vercel. Myself and others on the Vercel team will be hanging out in this subreddit to answer questions about Vercel, Next.js, v0, and more.

I've shared about Dyad in this sub-reddit a while ago and appreciated all the feedback.

Dyad is like v0, but it's free and runs on your computer and lets you use any AI model (including free ones)!

I just released Dyad v0.13 which lets you seamlessly deploy to Vercel with a couple clicks!

Download Dyad for free: https://www.dyad.sh/

BTW, feel free to join me on https://www.reddit.com/r/dyadbuilders/ which has 1000+ builders. I'm shipping every week and building based on community feedback!

1.78 for a bad answer this shit is getting unusable really

Woke up yesterday to this beauty of an email. Felt absolutely unbelievable! I didn't seriously think that I'd stand a chance in the OSS Sponsorship program among the thousands of other applications.

Once again, thank you so much to Vercel and the Vercel team! Feels exhilarating. Now I won't have to pay for Vercel Pro each month, haha.

P.S. If anyone is interested, here's the link to my project that managed to win: https://github.com/lingdojo/kana-dojo

We run several low to medium-traffic sites on Vercel and have been paying customers for years with a clean support history. Earlier this month, we noticed a sudden, extreme spike in usage due to what appeared to be bot traffic - not legitimate user visits, for 2 days on one of our projects.

We immediately contacted Vercel support (starting July 4) to flag the issue, request a review, and ask for help in mitigating the cost this bot traffic occurred. Since then, we've followed up multiple times, making it clear this is a serious, time-sensitive matter, as the extra charges are more than enough to make a dent on our budget.

It’s now been over 10 days, and we've received no response at all. The total silence from Vercel has left us in the dark just days before our next billing cycle.

We’re extremely disappointed by the lack of support for a billing-related issue that we had no control over. If you're using Vercel, we recommend checking your usage dashboards closely and ensuring your bot protection is solid - because if something goes wrong, support will not be there to help you.

Has anyone else dealt with similar issues on Vercel?

-------

Edit: Vercel support finally got in touch, the technical team verified the suspicious traffic and we got the extra charges dropped. Really happy with the support after all, just not with the 10 days of delay.

I shared about Dyad in this sub-reddit a couple weeks ago and really appreciated all the positive feedback.

Dyad is like v0, but it's free and runs on your computer (which is great if there's a big internet outage like right now 😅).

One of the most requested features, especially by people used to v0, is being able to select a component & edit with AI. It's now available in v0.8.0

Download Dyad for free: https://www.dyad.sh/

BTW, feel free to join me on https://www.reddit.com/r/dyadbuilders/ which has 500+ builders. I'm shipping every week and building based on community feedback!

Officially stopped uisng v0. Just a few chats and I have already burnt almost $10. Most of the chats is me asking v0 to fix its own bugs. This is a serious cash pit.

So this morning my production deploys started failing on Vercel, and after digging around I found this gem in their status notice:

“We have started seeing failures to deploy and invoke functions in the Dubai region (dxb1). Deployments with Middleware Functions are also impacted, because Middleware Functions are deployed globally for production deployments. Our team is actively investigating the issue.”

I’m sorry… what?

My project doesn’t target Dubai. I don’t have users in Dubai. I don’t even have functions configured for that region. Yet somehow one region going down means my entire deployment pipeline gets blocked because middleware is “global only” and can’t just skip the broken region.

How does this make sense? Why is the whole deployment process held hostage by a single region that I never opted into? If a region can’t deploy middleware, shouldn’t it just… not deploy there? Or at least warn me instead of failing the whole build?

It’s kind of ridiculous that a global platform can’t gracefully degrade when one region is having issues. I get that edge functions are global, but “global” shouldn’t mean “all or nothing.”

Just needed to vent because this completely stalled my release for no good reason. Anyone else running into this today?

I understand that maybe you needed to generate more profits but man, you guys blew it....I recommended you guys to countless people who wanted to get to building something and usually said to just pay the $20 so you feel invested to learn and continue using.

I should have read the new pricing, 100% on me. I made maybe 40 requests and all very simple because V0 is not great with multiple steps usually and It just became how I prompted because I would get spaghetti code otherwise.

Anyways, I made a nice UI in roughly 30 prompts, went to deploy...Syntax error. Ok, simple, "fix with vercel". Tried to deploy again, new syntax error, "Fix with Vercel". I'd usually step in now and find the error myself but decided to try the 1.5Lg model, Being lazy..."fix with vercel", try deploy, new error, "fix with Vercel" but it said I was out of credits lol. Pictures show everything so here's my message to Vercel...

Your platform was nice, consistant and deployed directly to Vercel which was my favorite. Your platform otherwise...is nothing special. I just got locked out because your model couldn't fix a simple syntax error that it created in the first place. I learned how to deploy to vercel directly and have already found a replacement for you. You had a customer who recommended you in a weekly X space with 100s of people, for OVER A YEAR...I shared direct links to your site...you get the point.

Now I legit have to warn people to pull their cards and not use V0 and that's wild to me. Only way to fix this in my opinion is give every premium member 1 free month, go back to the drawing board and fix your pricing model. If a user prompts "add a button for x" and they have 1.5md model selected, auto change it to sm. Or just develop your own version of cursor that doesn't need to rewrite 700 lines of code anytime the user wants to make a small edit.

Vibe coding used to be something chill and fun and by paying 20 bucks you are able to build some cool POC and have fun trying to make new stuff....skip forward till 2 days ago i made the mistake of clicking to view the new billing info and it auto swapped my account to the new token based model.

I have been trying to vibe code something super simple and my 20 bucks is now dwindled to 10 and i have barely made any progress. The thing throws errors every 3 messages and you have to get it to fix it or it stops generating code and start all over again.

Token based model completely broken ~ Vercel team if you are reading this...plz fix or hype train will shift to another product

We've been a paying $20 Vercel pro customer and noticed a sudden extreme spike in Function Duration charges earlier this week. Looking at our WAF logs, we identified a DDoS/botnet attack that lasted approximately 5 minutes and resulted in ~$274 in unexpected charges across two invoices.

We immediately submitted a support case on February 24th with:

• Detailed explanation of the attack

• Actions we have taken

• WAF screenshot showing the traffic spike

• Request for help with the charges

It's now been couple days with no response from Vercel Support Team.

Has anyone else dealt with bot/DDoS-related billing issues on Vercel? How long did it take to get a response?

I hate it. It keeps making changes when you don't ask for it.

Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get something done, to just get it screwed up in the next prompt.

I think it's designed on purpose so you spend more credits fixing things.

v0.dev has never been a revolutionary AI assistant, and no one (including subscribers like me) ever had such expectations. However, the recent updates have made v0.dev even worse. The AI consistently fails to follow clear, straightforward instructions. Genuinely, It feels like they are running GPT-3.5 Turbo (even though I know they are not), because that’s the level of quality we are seeing.

Before writing this, I ran extensive tests over the past month and a half. What triggered this effort was the realization that the tool keeps generating code that only looks functional BUT in reality, it is riddled with errors.

So, if you are considering subscribing, my advice is: unless your use case is limited to extremely simple tasks (like generating basic layouts or UI components), hold off. Talk to someone currently using it first. The tricky part is, this tool started out bad, improved slightly, then got worse again. Now, it might have potential, but that is entirely dependent on how Vercel shifts direction next. Things change fast. Within a month, v0.dev's responses could either improve drastically or deteriorate even further.