Digitalocean's (not related to them in any way) app platform (and I'm sure many other cloud providers) provides almost everything that vercel does, at a fraction of the cost. I'm surprised this is not a well known fact.
This post appears to be AI generated (or heavily edited). eg “This wasn’t just about saving money.
It was about gaining control over how our system works”
People should also look at Railway especially if majority of your users are in a single region because you will only really pay a price during active times and during times with low activity you will pay almost nothing.