[Raed667]

They're valued (Nov 2021) at $2.5 billion. They seem to have +430 employees.

At its core, their paid product is a thin layer over AWS and CloudFlare.

I'm not saying I don't like the product, I'm saying this doesn't make sense to me.

[cal85]

I agree it’s odd, and I’m not sure, but it feels to me like a big chunk of their staff might be involved with building Next.js and also running the annual conference of the same name which gets a lot of attention. I think maybe they see this as their moat. Any product that is just a thin layer around AWS is in danger of being suddenly eaten by a competitor or an OSS alternative or AWS itself. For Vercel, owning one of the world’s most popular web frameworks, which just happens to be particularly optimised for their own platform (both the deployment DX and performance), probably gives them a decent moat in that it keeps a huge number of devs around the world familiar with and positive about Vercel.