| Fair answer, thanks for sharing. This aligns with my own experience. I do deep backend systems stuff in my day job (just bringing this up to refute the whole "people just don't want to learn Linux" thing, I've even done kernel and eBPF work in the past and can still see value in Vercel), but still support some mostly front end Next.js apps for some small clients from back when I was freelancing. The vercel ecosystem is perfect for that kind of work. I don't want to (and probably don't have the time) to be managing a bunch of cloud infrastructure for several varied small businesses outside of my day job. I need something where I get a call, go in and make a change, send them a nice preview link to preview the change, then deploy. Vercel makes that kind of business very easy to manage for me, and realistically none of these clients have the kind of traffic where a 100% price difference over managing it yourself would be saving them a lot of money or have a material impact on their finances or my pricing. My clients get more value from retaining my services this way because I have more free time to help them make actual changes, and less time taken up managing their infra, which they wouldn't see and wouldn't understand and shouldn't have to care about. They pay me a pretty average to below average web guy amount to be their "web guy", not their "server/cloud guy". If I switched from Vercel and started managing it all myself in AWS or Hetzner or something and trying to pinch pennies, I probably wouldn't be able to substantially lower my prices (time opportunity cost), but I WOULD probably have to drop some clients that have been with me a long time and that I feel some responsibility for. |