[eins1234]

Also, found out the hard way that "Enterprise" pricing (i.e. call us and we'll charge you an opaque amount based on whatever we think you can afford pricing) starts at 7 users.

Vercel is not much better at 10 users, and they hide it deep within their pricing table behind a tooltip so you're not likely to realize this until it's too late.

Cloudflare Pages doesn't charge per user but limits concurrent builds which can get really painful.

I honestly can't find a good option in this space anymore... What happened?

[pbowyer]

> I honestly can't find a good option in this space anymore... What happened?

They took lots of VC money, got crazy valuations and picked up a few enterprise customers as the JamStack trend grew - and now have to try to generate a return.

[tomnipotent]

> and now have to try to generate a return

Otherwise called running a business.

[acoard]

You missed the point. Many businesses only need revenue (or EBITDA) to exceed expenses and you're profitable. Once you take VC money, you must exceed profitability and provide a return on VC money. Not all businesses must make a return on outside investment because they did not take outside investment.

[tomnipotent]

Assuming that 7-10 users are FTE, the company is already spending more than $1M on salary and related costs. I imagine the annual Enterprise pricing for Vercel for that numbers of users would hover around 1/4 of an FTE's salary, which is reasonable considering the value provided.

[eins1234]

The increase in value provided by these services is very much linear w.r.t. number of users. The 10x+ leap in cost with enterprise pricing is not at all justified by additional value provided.

I don't mind paying a fair, pre-disclosed price for services that provide value. I do mind opaque enterprise sales tactics that try to take full percentage points off my available runway for no discernable increase in value when I try to add one more user. Doubly so when they go to such lengths to cover it up as Vercel is currently doing.

[mhoad]

Add me to the list of voices who are highly skeptical about Vercel.

I recall watching a video on their YouTube account a few months ago where their head of devrel tried to interview a famous personality from the “cloud native” community (Kelsey Hightower) as a way to introduce their “edge functions” nonsense.

The entire thing was a train wreck from about ten minutes in when he started asking questions about how it actually worked and what kind of trade offs it would imply.

I remember they had to do a bunch of obvious hard cuts presumably to remove the more embarrassing stuff and it always stood out as a snake oil company to me ever since then.

The fact that they also seem to rely on deceptive pricing and dark patterns for sales seems very on brand with what I recall thinking about them at the time.

The interview in question is here in case anyone is interested https://youtu.be/yuxd2kurpzk

[leerob]

I’m sorry you feel this way. I personally enjoyed the interview quite a bit (Kelsey is very knowledgeable about both the past and present of computing).

I cut out parts of the interview to make it shorter. If you’d like to verify what I showed, you can deploy an Astro site with Edge Functions for free: https://vercel.com/templates/astro/astro-edge-functions

Open to feedback on how we can do better next time. Would you prefer more discussion about tradeoffs?

[tomnipotent]

> so when they go to such lengths to cover it up

Yeah, because enterprise pricing is so nefarious. It's fine if having to negotiate a contract intimidates you, but there's nothing sinister in it. It's not possible to offer a simple tiered pricing plan that can accommodate every enterprise customer and their usage requirements. Maybe companies A and B have the same number of users, but B consumes 10x the bandwidth. Should B be paying more than A?

Companies can't stay in business if it costs more to service the business than the revenues coming in.

[eins1234]

> Yeah, because enterprise pricing is so nefarious.

The cover up I was referring to was the 10 user limit before Enterprise pricing gets applied, hidden behind a tooltip deep in their pricing grid.

I thought it was obvious given that every one of these companies have enterprise pricing and advertise it front and center, but only Vercel hides the user limit. Assuming your post is in good faith and not a deliberate strawman, I concede that I could have been more specific.

[zebracanevra]

You can use CF Pages with your own build infrastructure, it has "direct uploads" now. It's currently unlimited in the amount of deploys you can do a month. I don't think CF knows how to price it yet, so I wouldn't rely on this being free forever.

[eins1234]

That's good to know! Would be nice to hear from someone from CF on how they plan on monetizing these "direct uploads" before we start investing in a migration.

[zoover2020]

+1, looking for answers too.