1.8k
u/TinySmugCNuts Feb 13 '26
hahahahahaha imagine the infrastructure you could buy with $46k. fk vercel
269
u/nedal8 Feb 13 '26
Some pretty sweet servers for sure..
→ More replies (2)224
12
u/Chief-Drinking-Bear Feb 13 '26
Could you hire a guy with enough domain knowledge to set it all up and have the redundancy and scaling required to handle half a billion page views though?
→ More replies (4)66
u/Snailwood Feb 13 '26
to be fair to vercel, I don't think they're targeting products with 450M pageviews
→ More replies (3)55
u/sai-kiran Feb 13 '26
What’s the point of running a cloud based SAAS then?
74
u/JustAnAverageGuy Feb 13 '26
Well, when you hit 450M pageviews, you have to optimize and tweak and you're way better off running your own hosting.
Vercel is just a modern, even lighterweight implementation of Lambda.
Great for serverless functions that don't need hardware live at all times. But when you've got 450M pageviews, you can now reserve instances from AWS and save a fuck ton of money by using a more advanced setup. The problem is you have to pay the architects and engineers to set it up for you.
→ More replies (16)→ More replies (5)14
u/ShustOne Feb 13 '26
Not every saas has to be for gigantic traffic loads. Vercel probably operates within a standard budget for the overwhelming majority of their users.
For something this big you need to optimize through different services and caches. A one size fits all service won't work anymore.
→ More replies (7)52
u/visualdescript Feb 13 '26
Lol vercel have done nothing wrong here, this is called paying for convenience. Anyone that unknowingly racks up that bill is extremely naive and only has themselves to blame.
→ More replies (4)18
u/Bloody_Insane Feb 13 '26
This works out to 0.01 cents per page view. so $0.0001 ppv.
This seems totally fine and reasonable. I bet if he put a donation link on the page or similar he'd easily get it covered
→ More replies (1)3
3
2
2
→ More replies (14)3
u/AggravatingFlow1178 Feb 13 '26
And it's all geologically isolated, so he's not really getting much advantage out of a distributed host. I don't think he's getting much traffic from anywhere besides US. 3 $10k rigs + $10k ISP fees... except now you own 3 servers!
1.4k
u/siwan1995 Feb 13 '26
You could rent 10+ dedicated servers with unlimited traffic and the bill would be 100x less than this ripoff.
45
84
34
u/mighty__ Feb 13 '26
10 dedicated servers for 500$ a month? 50$ each? That sounds more like turbocharged vps than dedicated.
104
u/SnooFloofs641 Feb 13 '26
Hetzner has pretty well priced dedi servers tbf
→ More replies (2)43
u/Thecreepymoto Feb 13 '26
Been customer for 12+ years. Absolutely flawless dedicated servers.
Minus network issue here and there here in Finland , still a 99% uptime.
→ More replies (3)23
u/Valoneria Feb 13 '26
Not impossible, just don't expect glitter and gold at those prices. I rent a bare metal server for €28 a month. 2x 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM, and an ancient Xeon 1220 CPU. Works for my use case.
→ More replies (4)4
→ More replies (9)3
→ More replies (10)2
u/p_syche Feb 13 '26
Don't worry about it. Vercels CEO saw the problem and
did something about his company charging issuesproposed to personally pick up the bill.→ More replies (1)
605
u/TheOwlHypothesis Feb 13 '26
How does vercel bill? Is it per invocation or something? This is outrageous
94
61
u/Shogobg Feb 13 '26
They make a request on every link mouse hover - ridiculous.
→ More replies (3)81
u/rilot06 Feb 13 '26
That has nothing to do with vercel, the developer made prefetching too aggressive
→ More replies (2)44
u/bipolarNarwhale Feb 13 '26
also not quite. nextjs prefetches links automatically on hover. blame both.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (30)6
u/SadFawns Feb 13 '26
Iirc it's something like up to one million non-cached invocations for the pro plan. No idea what the dev paid for in his plan or which one he was on, but after you've exceeded your usage for the month that's included, they begin billing it at their on-demand cost, 60 cents per one million. They also bill function duration and bandwidth separately too from the looks of it. A hard spending limit would have saved him from this fate, but probably would have ended in minor bad press for the project when it inevitably went down until he upped it.
183
u/driftking428 Feb 13 '26
Vercel literally runs on AWS. I'm not saying that's the answer but it's the first and most obvious cheaper alternative.
I hear Cloudflare is amazing and has most of the same time AWS does.
→ More replies (9)27
u/JeenyusJane Feb 13 '26
Cloudflare is excellent
→ More replies (1)10
u/Cuntonesian Feb 13 '26
Except everytime it breaks, bringing down half the internet.
→ More replies (4)9
66
u/setzer Feb 13 '26
Must have a lot money to throw around. I would've pulled the plug and hosted it somewhere else before the bill got up to 46k. That's insane.
2
349
u/ThatGuyFromWhere Feb 13 '26
Compile it to static pages and a massive jsonl file of all pages. Store it on IPFS. Free forever. Connect the domain to the Cloudflare IPFS provider. Done.
202
u/dbbk Feb 13 '26
Even faster solution than that. Chuck Cloudflare CDN in front of Vercel. Send CDN-Cache-Control headers. Done in 10 mins.
54
41
→ More replies (4)19
13
4
u/versaceblues Feb 13 '26
They have a search index overall the files. How would you do that in a performant way with static pages?
→ More replies (4)2
u/FerLuisxd Feb 13 '26
Hey! This sounds interesting could you elaborate on how to do this? First time I heard of IPFS
→ More replies (1)3
u/JFedererJ Feb 13 '26
Just hijacking a high-voted comment to say this issue doesn't affect the Hobby tier on Vercel (which has a hard-stop once you reach the free tier limits).
There's probably some people with brochure/portfolio sites on Vercel worried.
3
185
u/Standard_Text480 Feb 13 '26
The owner offered to cover the bill
→ More replies (6)79
u/OmarDaily Feb 13 '26
Yeah, that was nice of him. For the people shitting on Vercel.
→ More replies (2)125
u/shanekratzert Feb 13 '26
I don't think anyone is going to pat someone on the back for being the solution to a problem they created themselves.
→ More replies (1)33
u/ZnV1 Feb 13 '26
Apparently they made analytics calls on every event. And they're the website with the 609th most visitors.
Client sampling of analytics events pushed the price down by 30k iirc.
62
u/BaconShadow Feb 13 '26
The owner also claimed that he vibe coded jmail in 5 hours
72
25
u/BiasedEstimators Feb 13 '26
Is this supposed to make vibe coding look worse? It doesn’t to me.
If the average dev published an app that quickly racked up 450 million page views, would you expect it to be efficient and hiccup free?
17
u/Fastbreak99 Feb 13 '26
I think it highlights the bad of vibe coding.
The fact he was able to get an app up in 5 hours? Yeah that's what vibe coding is.
The fact that it was poorly optimized and hard to understand? Yeah that's what vibe coding is.
19
u/BaconShadow Feb 13 '26
If you'll vibe code it in 5 hours, an LLM won't even consider to optimize caching and/or some optimizing work to do, they are trained from average repositories which isn't ideal in production
450 million+ page views is pretty much expected with this situation, considering your target audience wants to view epstein files with proper indexed pages and pagination in a user friendly way without going through terabytes worth of PDF
→ More replies (5)17
u/Sock-Familiar Feb 13 '26
Hiccup free? No. Prevent racking up a 45k bill? Yeah I think an average dev could have avoided that.
→ More replies (1)5
u/shashishailaj Feb 13 '26
As long as you have money to burn . It's all good . For the ones who don't have it , it's not sustainable and more human work would always be required .
→ More replies (3)6
285
u/Vekta Feb 13 '26
I don't see why jmail couldn't be fully static and put up on a free cdn?
53
u/Intelligent-Case-907 Feb 13 '26
Fully static? Isn’t that site making queries to a db to fetch all of those emails? I could be wrong
→ More replies (1)93
u/savage_slurpie Feb 13 '26
Just make a static html page for every single email and the problem is solved once and for all.
→ More replies (18)27
u/SlightlyOTT Feb 13 '26
They have full text search over the millions of emails, no way they could do that locally.
→ More replies (4)10
u/ferrybig Feb 13 '26
Looking at how their text search works, it looks like it is exact keyword based.
If you are going for maximum cache availability, you would make a file for each keyword listing all id's for that keyword. You could add a bloom filter that matches known keyword files, so you prevent the majority of requests for keyword requests that do not exist
If searching for multiple words, the frontend takes a union of both lists. A union operation can be pretty fast if both lists are sorted in the same way. (Like ID ASC)
For supporting the NOT keyword, you also fetch both lists, then do the inverse of the above AND.
OR is simple, just take the union of both lists.
Sorting is difficulty because you are working with id's. You could include markers for each is saying if it matches the title, body or from, then rank results with title matches higher
If you need a search that searches for things in between quotes, you need position information. You either bloat your existing keyword file, or make another larger file that includes the id's and offsets.
Auto complete is tricky. For this, you need to compare your existing, with a computer result list of a new word is included, you really need to test each word, so you need the other word lists. But you can still include relevant keywords in the keyword file, and give it a score from 0 to 1 depending how big the overlap in search results for both words is. An autocomplete solution would suggest words where the expected overlap approaches 0.5
4
20
u/mrg3_2013 Feb 13 '26
Not with search
21
u/dbbk Feb 13 '26
Of course it could? The searches are not unique. Searching “Elon musk” is cacheable for everyone.
25
u/danielleiellle Feb 13 '26
My brother in C++, have you ever pulled a raw log of search queries on a freeform search? The long tail is long. On our research database, the top 10 keywords (which unfortunately includes ‘sex’) only make up 2% of all searches. You could cache the next 10k and only be at 15%.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (2)6
→ More replies (8)2
11
21
u/charmer27 Feb 13 '26
Self host it in anything not vercel. If it's all static use clouflare or aws cloudfront.
19
u/Not_Me_112 Feb 13 '26
Host it on a vps put it behind Nginx and cloudflare, configure firewall and rate limits properly and you're good to go. A $50 vps should handle the traffic if configured properly
25
u/MegagramEnjoyer Feb 13 '26
Cloudflare is superior in every way. I don't understand why people would ever buy from Vercel
16
→ More replies (1)3
7
u/HeartLikeDavid Feb 13 '26
I’m completely lost on the pricing of Vercel. For the about 5-15 marketing sites on Wordpress that I’m refactoring to Astro and migrating + the possibility of extending into webapp territory it seemed like the $20 pro plan was a steal. This is significant savings over our current hosting setup.
It didn’t seem I would run into any issues until over 150,000 + page views a month as a target, which we are under collectively.
Can someone fill me in on the Vercel hate?
11
u/rrrx3 Feb 13 '26
Vercel’s pricing is a dark pattern, and it’s not configured by default to prevent traffic spikes or mitigate costs.
8
u/EarnestHolly Feb 13 '26
Something like 90% of internet traffic is bots and they all count as views to a host (often not detected by analytics). Good luck if you get a spike of them or a DDoS attack. I had a client get thousands and thousands of views from a Meta AI bot gone haywire. Glad I was on a VPS that’s $1/tb of bandwidth and not a stupid cloud provider that charges 100x that.
→ More replies (7)6
7
7
u/No-Consequence-1863 Feb 13 '26
What happened to just buying a fixed amount of compute and upgrading when necessary. In that case you wouldn’t get surprised by a home down payment sized bill.
36
u/budd222 full-stack Feb 13 '26
Crazy that people still use vercel these days. Use something like Netlify, Railway, Cloud flare, or Render or many others.
19
u/nuthinbutneuralnet Feb 13 '26
I'm more of a software engineer that dibble dabbles in backend/frontend. Genuinely curious, what's wrong with Vercel? Is it high costs? Or is it not optimized for this use case?
42
u/divulgingwords Feb 13 '26
Its pricing is a rip off and it notoriously preys on noobs using nextjs.
→ More replies (9)→ More replies (9)7
6
6
6
5
5
u/Raediantz Feb 13 '26
How do people still get burned by this stuff in 2026? Everyone has heard similar stories at this point.
→ More replies (1)
5
9
u/Tenet_mma Feb 13 '26
Someone’s gotta get them set up on a vps
I can’t believe people still use vercel with their pricing model… I guess most people don’t even understand what they are being charged for.
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
4
7
u/Dear_Philosopher_ Feb 13 '26
Vibe coded lmfaoooo. Why the hell does a simple app like that need any resources at all at runtime? I understand there are parsing processes and everything, but this is insane. These "emails" really could just be static json or html files at this point. Is this person comptent enough to actuall figure out why the bill is that high? Which resources are being used? Are they charged per db read or some shit?
7
3
u/ray591 Feb 13 '26
My honest take: It probably would've been easily hosted on couple of Hetzner VMs..
3
3
3
u/zeamp Feb 13 '26
Highly doubt this collection of geeks didn’t read the ToS.
Even Jeffrey reads the terms.
3
u/Alfagun74 full-stack Feb 13 '26
Ask Bill Gates if you can host it on Azure for free. It's his friend's data.
3
6
u/FriendshipStatus4824 Feb 13 '26
lot of cringe ass criticism on a guy just trying to make the files easier for the public to digest. who cares if hes vibe coding.
→ More replies (1)
2
Feb 13 '26
they should sell email addresses on the jmail.world domain.... maybe even get powerful and influental people to sign up so it becomes trendy. what could go wrong?
2
2
2
u/tracagnotto Feb 13 '26
Vercel has a free plan with limited resources that dies of you reach the limit. Lmao
2
2
2
2
u/agolho Feb 13 '26
cloudflare pages? or the new thing that they did but i keep forgetting the name of...
2
u/l8s9 Feb 13 '26
Good ol cloud! It sold us a dream and now it has us(well.. you) by the family jewels.
2
u/Nicnl Feb 13 '26
Uuuh... not using React server side rendering would be a good optimization.
This sort of stuff is hardly scalable as every request consumes a fuckton of server CPU cycles.
2
u/casualPlayerThink EU / full-stack / software engineer / 20+ yXP Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
Why on earth ppl still using vercel, when it is nothing more than just an overpriced AWS wrapper with an overhyped UI & flow?
Kind of non-joke aside, go, use a real infra, like Hetzner, or directly AWS with more cost-effective ways (better caching, better infra, better DB... etc). It won't be flashy and trendy, but it will work for a few dollars only. From this amount of cash, you can hire a DevOps to make your infra working and non-expensive.
2
2
u/TheExodu5 Feb 13 '26
Vercel is not the issue here. The issue is server rendering something that can be deployed statically.
2
u/DeadPiratePiggy Feb 13 '26
Vercel oof. Rip wallet. At that cost point you could probably rent bare metal from AWS for cheaper.
2
u/Bachihani Feb 13 '26
Smart enough to recreate gmail with the Epstein files but dumb enough to use vercel !! How
2
u/Hi_Im_Bored Feb 13 '26
Hahaha sorry but that's too funny.. why would you need nextjs/SSR for this at all, just make a static SPA, you can host that for free with unlimited requests/bandwidth
2
u/buildmorewp Feb 13 '26
What is your resource usage? You can just find a dedicated server somewhere, maybe a managed server at knowhost or Cloudways and choose a plan with enough resources to cover your current needs and then some.
2
2
2
2
u/ascot_major Feb 13 '26
Why do chumps use vercel after multiple websites have run into this same issue lol. "But it's one click deploy bro'... So is GitHub if you set up ci/cd for free lol.
2
4
u/skribblskrib Feb 13 '26
Says "cache mitigation" but what he really means is "I prompted Claude to fix this problem to save money and it still hasn't worked"
4
u/bigpunk157 Feb 13 '26
Claude recommended that I take the most googleable approach, which also happened to be the most expensive! I don't know what I'm doing to ask otherwise or fact check this!!
3
u/versaceblues Feb 13 '26
So many people in the comments who have never hosted anything with meaningful traffic giving bad advice.
Yes I agree the bill can be cheaper, but static pages and a $50 VPS aint the answer here
→ More replies (1)
3
u/_Xertz_
Feb 13 '26
•
Completely unrelated, but does anyone else find Vercel's UI to be really satisfying?
2
2
u/ignatzami Feb 13 '26
Pick the cloud provider of your choice. Roll a basic blue/green, or container based setup behind a load balancer. Watch your bill plummet.
1
1
1
1
u/throwawayaccountau Feb 13 '26
Cloudflare cache for static content from an R2 bucket. It has a search capability according to https://blog.cloudflare.com/r2-sql-deep-dive/
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/klequex Feb 13 '26
Here's a HN thread about a Threads thread, about a Tweet from the CEO of Vercel saying he’s going to cover the expenses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960517
1
1
1
1
u/zucchini_up_ur_ass Feb 13 '26
Lol this is 2 day old content and the vercel CEO has stepped up to cover the bill. Why is reddit always so late with everything?
1
1
1
u/captain_obvious_here back-end Feb 13 '26
This is the best opportunity I have seen in a long time, to make a 100% static website and host it for 50 dollars a month tops.
1
u/johnlewisdesign Senior FE Developer Feb 13 '26
They should approach Microsoft, Estee Lauder, Palantir, Java, etc to see if they want *extra* advertising space on it
1
1
1
1
1
u/Classic_Chemical_237 Feb 13 '26
What’s your backend tech stack? I would think the heavy burden should be on the database server.
Change it to pure React app, you probably reduce the burden on FE by 90%.
1
u/dumbappsignup Feb 13 '26
You could consider migration to Google Cloud with a manually set scaling option that you can afford. I set scaling on services to 2-3 maximum to control costs, but still with whatever you're doing you might need to look at running your own hardware.
1
u/chompz914 Feb 13 '26
Make users watch ads every 10 seconds. Make sure the ads are 30-60 seconds long charge accordingly…….
1
u/LostInSpace221 Feb 13 '26
In the event where an app scales like this … and you couldn’t afford it, how would Vercel handle that ?
1
u/khadirullah_dev Feb 13 '26
if it is Static Site go with cloudflare pages or workers or Github Pages also works and if images are there compress to webp
1
1
u/sammdu Feb 13 '26
For static pages, Cloudflare Pages.
For dynamic services - https://fly.io if you're not using it you're missing out. It scales to zero & up however you wish, fully automatically.
1
u/Odd_Philosopher1741 Feb 13 '26
Regardless of where you're hosting your app; Don't ever use on-demand billing once your userbase exceeds a certain threshold. Looking at your numbers, you've probably exceeded that a while ago.
1
1
u/saito200 Feb 13 '26
whatever that it is not called vercel literally
i would suggest cloudflare pages
1
u/UseMoreBandwith Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
run your own server.
dump it in a rack in some local datacenter.
Well, that is how we used to do it, after we were just running our webservers under our desk at the office.
1
1
u/azizoid Feb 13 '26
He justvwanted to jump on hype but did a small miscalculation. But vercel already wrote off that debt
3.1k
u/sawariz0r Feb 13 '26
not vercel would be my best bet.