I wonder what the aversion is to using a plain old server / vps. It's really not that difficult to deploy nowadays [0][1][2][3] and I'd rather get an $8 bill every month as insurance than ever worry about shit like OP just went through. It'll probably be more performant anyway due to cold starts and "edge" still having to hit us-east-1 for data.. cache your static files with Cloud Flare/Front. People are always surprised by how much traffic a single VPS can take[4] and believe it all has to be serverless to be web scale. I believe HN still runs on a single core or something.
There's a ton of places to get cloud credits as well, too many to link, so just Bing™ it
Vercel is sooo easy. Hook it to a repo and you’re done. It’s also cheap depending on use case. Edge functions are nice. Zero complaints from me as a customer for a little over a year.
I work with a small crew and having no server maintenance lets us ship more code. Really as simple as that.
You're right I used the term interchangeably - AWS Lightsail would have been a good service comparison, and those do start at $3.50[0]. The $8 figure came from running the smallest Fargate task at .25cpu and 512mb, excluding the load balancer etc. [1]
It was announced that App Runner (today) allowed for smaller instances[2], and the price/mo for this instance would basically be 1/4th of the previous default. So ~$14 [3]
Took me less than 1 min to setup NextJS on AWS App Runner with auto deploys on commits, the rest was waiting for it to finish which I'll admit, Vercel is much faster at.
Bursty workloads? I.e people use my app from 9am - 11am and then nothing for the rest of the day. I’m paying $8 but only around $2 of compute is actually helpful. Setting spend limits on lambda / vercel / cloudfns means the entire $8 go to my bursty workload
I work with a small crew and having no server maintenance lets us ship more code. Really as simple as that.