Used For

• +**Your Next.js app takes 3 hours to deploy on AWS and breaks half the time** → Git push deploys in 10 seconds, handles 30k users automatically
• +**You're manually scaling servers at 2am when traffic spikes** → Auto-scales from zero to thousands of users, you sleep through the night
• +**Your API functions crash under load and you're debugging server configs** → Serverless functions handle requests individually, one broken request doesn't kill everything
• +Edge caching serves your videos globally - users in Tokyo get the same speed as users in New York
• +Deploys preview versions for every git branch - test changes before they go live without breaking production

Best For

• >Your app crashes every time it hits Reddit's front page
• >You're tired of spending weekends fixing server issues instead of building features
• >Lost a customer demo because your site was down and you had no idea why

Not For

• -Solo devs building simple blogs — you'll hit the bandwidth limit in two weeks and get a $60 surprise bill
• -Teams under 5 people — you're paying $20/month per person for features you'll use once
• -Anyone wanting to host non-JavaScript apps — it's built for React/Next.js, everything else feels like an afterthought

Pairs With

• *Next.js (the framework Vercel was basically built for - everything else works but this is where it shines)
• *GitHub (where you push code and Vercel automatically deploys it)
• *PostgreSQL (via connection pooling in serverless functions since traditional DB connections break)
• *Stripe (for payments in e-commerce sites that need to scale fast)
• *Supabase (for backend services since Vercel handles frontend but you still need a database)
• *Tailwind CSS (for styling since the whole stack optimizes for fast modern web development)

The Catch

• !The 100GB free bandwidth disappears fast if you have images or videos - most marketing sites blow through it in weeks
• !Functions have cold starts that add 1-2 seconds to the first request, which kills the seamless experience they promise
• !Build timeouts hit you when your project gets bigger - large apps fail to deploy 50% of the time on the Pro plan

Bottom Line

Deploys websites in seconds instead of hours, but the free tier runs out faster than your patience with AWS documentation.