15 ms·

Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

325 points by mxschmitt 6y ago

jeremiahlee 6y ago
I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce. Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.
- hantusk 6y ago
  ^ The re-brand makes much more sense in this light - a young company that can still only focus on 1 product, needs a name that is associated with their current product, and not now v1 and v2. But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.
- simonw 6y ago
  Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it there. The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though. My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-asgi-on-now-v2.md https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...
  - JimTheDev 6y ago
    Yeah they had Go support and yanked it. I don't use go but was surprised. Seems like at times they are hoping to be all things to everyone and at times trying to be really focused (although we might disagree with where they are focusing).
    - odensc 6y ago
      Wait, they don't support Go? It advertises that on their pricing page... https://vercel.com/pricing https://vercel.com/pricing And it's listed in their support docs here... https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    Do one for fly.io! :D
    - simonw 6y ago
      Already done! https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-fly https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-fly They wrote about it on their blog: https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-fly/ https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-f...
ankitkumar98 6y ago
Great to see this company growing :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mxschmitt 6y ago
Just great to see how this company grows and produces awesome developer tools, frameworks and platforms to improve the developer and user experience.
evanweaver 6y ago
Congrats Guillermo and team!
franky47 6y ago
Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).
- tango12 6y ago
  EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
  - choward 6y ago
    That's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why they changed their name.
    - CPLX 6y ago
      I mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand. It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
      - kernelsanderz 6y ago
        Doing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they already have the trademark registered for ZEIT (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise, easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least with their initial audience. Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
        CPLX 6y ago
        It’s a big world out there.
  - 6y ago
dna_polymerase 6y ago
- "ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites." What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also, rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel is just a faceless hull. Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's commendable.
swyx 6y ago
congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in. I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem. Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]: > The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way. I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns. The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4]. I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits. Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty. --- references 0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376 https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376 1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-experiences-with-concurrent-mode-and-suspense.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe... 2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do-the-dirty-work-for-you-55kd https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do... 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_flight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh... 4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816 https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816 5: https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel
harisvs-code 6y ago
I really liked the zeit brand. Vercel not so much. I hope that the name grows on me, either way I dont care as long as the tech is great.
thrwaway69 6y ago
Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known everywhere. And given their products have simple and non googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit so it's googleable. Good to see free personal plan tho.
sandGorgon 6y ago
Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in. This is a big backing for Next. However rebranding to Vercel is bad.
- franky47 6y ago
  That's the objective of Blitz.js [1]: build on top of Next.js for a rails-like experience, but made by an independent open-source community. [1] https://blitzjs.com/ https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz
  - k__ 6y ago
    Pretty slick! I thought about making "higher level" frameworks by combining "lower level" frameworks myself. How did you do it? I mean, it's not just wrapping the libraries, but also the CLIs.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sandGorgon 6y ago
    This is very cool. One suggestion - I highly recommend you mention that you're leveraging nextjs. There is a certain buy-in that nextjs has that would be hard elsewhere. In fact I would say that I would totally pay an annual subscription for this (even on "starter marketplaces" like themeforest).
    - franky47 6y ago
      It's not my project, you can probably talk about it with its creator: https://twitter.com/flybayer https://twitter.com/flybayer
    - flybayer 6y ago
      This is literally the first listed feature :)
tsar_nikolai 6y ago
I absolutely love the company and am a happy customer, but for the love of time, why give up such a good pun for a name? (For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)
DangerousPie 6y ago
I always found the name incredible confusing since there is a major German newspaper called ZEIT: https://www.zeit.de/ https://www.zeit.de/ I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.
kalev 6y ago
Might the name change come from one of lead investors named 'Accel', who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own brand? Vercel/Accel? I honestly don't understand why you would do that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand names in JS ecosystem out of the window.
- daniel_levine 6y ago
  Doesn’t come from us
jlelse 6y ago
The name "Zeit" was very confusing for Germans. "Zeit" is the regular word for time and there's also a newspaper called "Die ZEIT".
- adim86 6y ago
  LOL, really? source? Is Germany a big market for them? Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English
  - brazzy 6y ago
    > Is Germany a big market for them? It's a big market for most internationally operating companies, seems a smart move to take that into account early. > Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English And it caused them pretty big problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer I'm sure they've thoroughly vetted "Vercel" against potential trademark conflicts.
- jasonvorhe 6y ago
  I'm German and I know of no Germans who where confused by their branding.
zoul 6y ago
“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.” Is this satire? Can’t tell.
- kalium-xyz 6y ago
  They removed the gradient present on the full logo (which you sometimes see).
- choward 6y ago
  Same with this: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel. It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".
  - DagAgren 6y ago
    Also, "verizon" and "incel".
  - baxuz 6y ago
    sounds like "varicocele"
  - yboris 6y ago
    Also "vermicelli" (even closer in sound to "вермишель" in Russian) :P
  - ltrcola 6y ago
    It sounds like a new car name. 2020 Toyota Vercel. Wasn't there a model called the Tercel?
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tercel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tercel
  - pier25 6y ago
    To me it sounds like some corporate pharma company...
Rauchg 6y ago
Vercel CEO here. We are incredibly delighted to bring the new brand to the world and share the news of our funding. For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!
- karanganesan 6y ago
  curious why was the name Zeit not preferred?
  - brazzy 6y ago
    It's a German word and the name of one of Germany's biggest newspapers, and probably part of the name of dozens of businesses in all kinds of industries in Germany. Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.
    - netsharc 6y ago
      Yeah, not having your name instantly googleable in Germany (a big economy with a lot of developers) is probably a hindrance. Not to mention how stupid it would be to use in a sentence, imagine calling your product "Time", and a developer says e.g. "we're having issues with time.."
      - jonas21 6y ago
        A lot of products sound stupid when used in a sentence before you get used to them. We're having issues with zoom... We're having issues with chrome... We're having issues with word...
        PKop 6y ago
        The less nonsensical the word in context, the more confusing it is though. Do you dispute that "we're having issues with time" is much more vague and overloaded, than "we're having issues with zoom"?
ushakov 6y ago
glad you renamed it. The Zeit i know, was able to serve Docker images
gitgud 6y ago
A shame they changed the name, I liked "Zeit". The re-branding reminds me of the browser IDE "Hyperdev" which changed to "Gomix" and finally to "Glitch"... Everytime the name changes, people care less... but I'm no businessman > [1] ...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions. [1] https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing
m00dy 6y ago
ZEIT always sounded me something from Templars.
m00dy 6y ago
I use ZEIT for my side projects now. It is extremely efficient and time saver.
matthewcford 6y ago
one of our clients uses netlify, does anyone have experience with the two platforms and how they compare on price at the enterprise levels?
- iamtherhino 6y ago
  Vercel/ZEIT is typically a bit cheaper in the long run for popular sites with the fixed costs. If your traffic is really light, then Netlify probably is. If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)
bengale 6y ago
Awesome. I normally work on just web apps but had to build a website recently that had some complex bits in some pages but mainly a marketing site. The experience with nextjs and deploying with zeit was brilliant. Docs are good, everything works well, just an all round good experience. Please don't break it!
marban 6y ago
From unbrandable to unpronounceable.
adriand 6y ago
As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.” Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.
- kreetx 6y ago
  But what if this one specifically is a bad rebranding?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point? Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    To run from a bad reputation To expand in to a market that already has a well known company by that name Hard to rank for it for search purposes Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out of
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There are various types of rebranding that may or may not involve renaming. However, with respect to renaming specifically, it often also comes about because your company name now bears no relationship to what you actually do. To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just some letters.)
neom 6y ago
Congrats Guillermo!! Vercel is awesome, can't wait to see where you take the business. Keep up the great work.
sholladay 6y ago
I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/now#future-proof https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/now#why-not-aws-lambda-azure-google-cloud-functions https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...
- DagAgren 6y ago
  Same here. Migration path to Heroku was easier than migration path to Zeit v2, and Heroku hasn't fucked me over by forcing me to migrate to an entirely new model yet.
  - sholladay 6y ago
    I also went to Heroku. Icing on the cake was when I discovered that even on Heroku's free plan, we were getting significantly better performance than on Zeit's paid plan. Response times were more stable and had far less latency. Made me really happy and almost made it worth the frustration of having to migrate in the first place. Almost. Heroku has definitely improved over the years.
- baxuz 6y ago
  I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.
  - zoul 6y ago
    For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.
ezzzzz 6y ago
Literally just discovered Zeit, what I liked about it was the ability to choose different run-times, with a generous free tier, with none of the existential baggage of the other PAAS's options out there. Sigh, oh well.
- mcsdev 6y ago
  Everything you liked about ZEIT is present in Vercel! You can read more about it in our rebrand field book: https://www.notion.so/Vercel-Launch-1cab2369ab1c4d8db1987b68708be683 https://www.notion.so/Vercel-Launch-1cab2369ab1c4d8db1987b68...
  - DagAgren 6y ago
    Everything I liked about Zeit was Now v1, so, not really?
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      It took me awhile to come to terms with the truth that "You are not their target customer." Fair enough. Except that they built their brand off the backs of people they no longer want using their platform...
      - DagAgren 6y ago
        But, even if you were their target customer... Would you feel comfortable using their service, knowing that at least once before they decided their current customers are no longer their target customers, and screwed them all over?
artur_makly 6y ago
Congrats Guille .. Vamos!!
CSSer 6y ago
I’m surprised to see so many people nagging about the brand. As one user pointed out, there’s a big newspaper brand with that name already. And otherwise, who cares, really? Same company. It’s not a soccer team.
- PKop 6y ago
  I think the discussion would be different if the new name was better. Replacing zeit makes sense, not sure the chosen replacement was any good.
  - CSSer 6y ago
    Fair enough. I guess I know what Zeit means, but not Vercel. Maybe they just wanted the “V” to fit nicely next to the triangle? ;)
SnowingXIV 6y ago
I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites? With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the exception of forms. If this is just another choice that's good. Perhaps it's faster? I've deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but not much different than netlify's build that works with a git push. Either way, congrats on the funding! Disclaimer: I don't work for netlify, though I did interview with them awhile back.
- rymate1234 6y ago
  Main difference with Vercel / ZEIT is that unlike Netlify, it can more easily have SSR pages. So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can only really use the static site generation features of NextJS, whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API functions. Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-node-js-usage/legacy-serverful-behavior https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-nod... or Python https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-python-usage/web-server-gateway-interface https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-pyt...
  - pier25 6y ago
    But Netlify also has cloud functions, no?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dance2die 6y ago
      Not for SSR.
      - 6y ago
foreign-inc 6y ago
Have anyone used both https://redwoodjs.com https://redwoodjs.com and Nextjs and share their experience?
- matallo 6y ago
  Interested in this, too.
- swyx 6y ago
  ive tried out both. next.js focuses very much on the SSR/SSG job, whereas Redwood both stretches further in front of the stack (with Cells and a Form library) and further back in the stack (with Prisma/GraphQL). next is a lot more mature (5yrs?) whereas redwood is new. that help?
- deltron3030 6y ago
  Redwood doesn't hide their tutorial behind an account like Nextjs does, they're more user friendly. And it was impressive how smooth it went considering the underlying complexity of the tech stack.
  - deltron3030 6y ago
    The Next tutorial is now available without log-in, so the statement above isn't true anymore. Thanks Vercel!
erulabs 6y ago
Congratulations on the funding Guillermo!
Touche 6y ago
What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that the founders need to align the brand with the vision... Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?
- pier25 6y ago
  Other than the practical reasons (Zeit is a common German word) their product and focus has changed quite a bit. They started as serverless docker and changed to CDN + edge cloud functions to specialized hosting for front end projects.
crousto 6y ago
Judging by the comments so far, the name change backlash is of unseen-since-Qwikster proportions…
mtm7 6y ago
I'm a huge fan of Zeit/Vercel's products and design. I've interacted with their team on a few occasions and they've always been nice. Plus, their mechanical keyboard is super cool... [0] I absolutely loved the name "Zeit", although I've read in this thread that it could have branding/SEO issues. I'm hoping Vercel will grow on me – right now, it sounds like a combination of "incel", "Verizon", and maybe some kind of geriatric medicine. [0]: https://vercel.com/keyboard https://vercel.com/keyboard
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bsimpson 6y ago
Looks like React's originators (Jordan Walk and Pete Hunt) are funders.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sna1l 6y ago
I had a ton of trouble getting a simple gatsby.js website running on Zeit. Kept getting useless error messages that were impossible to debug. Tried Netlify and it worked without any changes to my code. The Zeit UI might be slicker, but it definitely isn't easier to use imo.
bionhoward 6y ago
I liked Zeit but had to switch because there was no way to get IP addresses to whitelist, so Vercel customers are likely to get hacked, because they’re forced to secure their database with only a password, and no firewall. Apparently you can fix this with an “enterprise” subscription, which is a huge red flag. Open source doesn’t get secure data? Vercel is likely to get hit with huge lawsuits over that, and I’m staying well clear until it’s fixed
- telotortium 6y ago
  What lawsuits? Don't virtually all open-source licenses in existence disclaim any warranty or fitness for a particular purpose?
  - bionhoward 6y ago
    True, and I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t care about them getting sued, I care about the fact I can’t protect customers’ data if I use Vercel
    - travltalk 6y ago
      Can speak first hand that you are right!
- noxplode 6y ago
  Can't you connect via SSL?
james-mcelwain 6y ago
"Jamstack" has to be the worst name for an architecture ever. "Javascript", "APIs", and "markup"... uhhh you mean like what the entire web already runs on?
- tirumaraiselvan 6y ago
  The goal was also probably (re)branding.
- hashkb 6y ago
  It stands for "Just Attempt Moving" off of our hosted service.
jariel 6y ago
Does anyone not directly involved in this kind of tech struggle to understand 'what on earth it does'? I understand vaguely from the marketing copy, but it's still pretty fuzzy. Here is their front page copy: "Develop. Preview. Ship. Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams. All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN." This doesn't really say a whole lot. Then we have these little bits: "Zero config Works out of the box with any web framework." Great, but what is it, and what does it do? "instant static deploys Push to Git and your website is live. Zero configuration required." So this is starting to make some sense - does this mean this technology will grab my github changes to push specific files to where I've hosted them? They ask me to 'import a project' and yet I have idea what that means. Here is the 'intro' in docs: [1] "Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration." That explains next to nothing. Terminology like 'Jamstack' is still very new and niche, I suggest outside of certain bubbles, very few people understand what that means, so the site is using language that is foreign to most readers. This is not going to work very well. ... It would be nice to think I'm a little slow, but I don't think I am - I think a large portion of today's marketing and communications is a little rubbish: it fails to explain within any reasonable detail 'what it is, what it does, why I would want it' and provide ultra-basic 'hello world' examples that explain the nature of the system. This is a problem. There are new techs released every day, I'm tired of struggling through weird non-explanations of various platforms just to get the basic idea of even what it does, this is something companies should focus on. [1] https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs

325 points by mxschmitt 6y ago

I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce. Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.

hantusk 6y ago
^ The re-brand makes much more sense in this light - a young company that can still only focus on 1 product, needs a name that is associated with their current product, and not now v1 and v2. But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.
simonw 6y ago
Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it there. The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though. My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-asgi-on-now-v2.md https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...
- JimTheDev 6y ago
  Yeah they had Go support and yanked it. I don't use go but was surprised. Seems like at times they are hoping to be all things to everyone and at times trying to be really focused (although we might disagree with where they are focusing).
  - odensc 6y ago
    Wait, they don't support Go? It advertises that on their pricing page... https://vercel.com/pricing https://vercel.com/pricing And it's listed in their support docs here... https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes
- mrkurt 6y ago
  Do one for fly.io! :D
  - simonw 6y ago
    Already done! https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-fly https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-fly They wrote about it on their blog: https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-fly/ https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-f...

ankitkumar98 6y ago

Great to see this company growing :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mxschmitt 6y ago

Just great to see how this company grows and produces awesome developer tools, frameworks and platforms to improve the developer and user experience.

evanweaver 6y ago

Congrats Guillermo and team!

franky47 6y ago

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

tango12 6y ago
EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
- choward 6y ago
  That's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why they changed their name.
  - CPLX 6y ago
    I mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand. It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
    - kernelsanderz 6y ago
      Doing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they already have the trademark registered for ZEIT (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise, easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least with their initial audience. Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
      - CPLX 6y ago
        It’s a big world out there.
- 6y ago

dna_polymerase 6y ago

- "ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites." What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also, rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel is just a faceless hull. Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's commendable.

swyx 6y ago

congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in. I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem. Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]: > The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way. I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns. The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4]. I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits. Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty. --- references 0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376 https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376 1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-experiences-with-concurrent-mode-and-suspense.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe... 2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do-the-dirty-work-for-you-55kd https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do... 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_flight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh... 4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816 https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816 5: https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel

harisvs-code 6y ago

I really liked the zeit brand. Vercel not so much. I hope that the name grows on me, either way I dont care as long as the tech is great.

thrwaway69 6y ago

Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known everywhere. And given their products have simple and non googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit so it's googleable. Good to see free personal plan tho.

sandGorgon 6y ago

Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in. This is a big backing for Next. However rebranding to Vercel is bad.

franky47 6y ago
That's the objective of Blitz.js [1]: build on top of Next.js for a rails-like experience, but made by an independent open-source community. [1] https://blitzjs.com/ https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz
- k__ 6y ago
  Pretty slick! I thought about making "higher level" frameworks by combining "lower level" frameworks myself. How did you do it? I mean, it's not just wrapping the libraries, but also the CLIs.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sandGorgon 6y ago
  This is very cool. One suggestion - I highly recommend you mention that you're leveraging nextjs. There is a certain buy-in that nextjs has that would be hard elsewhere. In fact I would say that I would totally pay an annual subscription for this (even on "starter marketplaces" like themeforest).
  - franky47 6y ago
    It's not my project, you can probably talk about it with its creator: https://twitter.com/flybayer https://twitter.com/flybayer
  - flybayer 6y ago
    This is literally the first listed feature :)

tsar_nikolai 6y ago

I absolutely love the company and am a happy customer, but for the love of time, why give up such a good pun for a name? (For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)

DangerousPie 6y ago

I always found the name incredible confusing since there is a major German newspaper called ZEIT: https://www.zeit.de/ https://www.zeit.de/ I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.

kalev 6y ago

Might the name change come from one of lead investors named 'Accel', who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own brand? Vercel/Accel? I honestly don't understand why you would do that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand names in JS ecosystem out of the window.

daniel_levine 6y ago
Doesn’t come from us

jlelse 6y ago

The name "Zeit" was very confusing for Germans. "Zeit" is the regular word for time and there's also a newspaper called "Die ZEIT".

adim86 6y ago
LOL, really? source? Is Germany a big market for them? Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English
- brazzy 6y ago
  > Is Germany a big market for them? It's a big market for most internationally operating companies, seems a smart move to take that into account early. > Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English And it caused them pretty big problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer I'm sure they've thoroughly vetted "Vercel" against potential trademark conflicts.
jasonvorhe 6y ago
I'm German and I know of no Germans who where confused by their branding.

zoul 6y ago

“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.” Is this satire? Can’t tell.

kalium-xyz 6y ago
They removed the gradient present on the full logo (which you sometimes see).
choward 6y ago
Same with this: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel. It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".
- DagAgren 6y ago
  Also, "verizon" and "incel".
- baxuz 6y ago
  sounds like "varicocele"
- yboris 6y ago
  Also "vermicelli" (even closer in sound to "вермишель" in Russian) :P
- ltrcola 6y ago
  It sounds like a new car name. 2020 Toyota Vercel. Wasn't there a model called the Tercel?
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tercel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tercel
- pier25 6y ago
  To me it sounds like some corporate pharma company...

Rauchg 6y ago

Vercel CEO here. We are incredibly delighted to bring the new brand to the world and share the news of our funding. For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!

karanganesan 6y ago
curious why was the name Zeit not preferred?
- brazzy 6y ago
  It's a German word and the name of one of Germany's biggest newspapers, and probably part of the name of dozens of businesses in all kinds of industries in Germany. Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.
  - netsharc 6y ago
    Yeah, not having your name instantly googleable in Germany (a big economy with a lot of developers) is probably a hindrance. Not to mention how stupid it would be to use in a sentence, imagine calling your product "Time", and a developer says e.g. "we're having issues with time.."
    - jonas21 6y ago
      A lot of products sound stupid when used in a sentence before you get used to them. We're having issues with zoom... We're having issues with chrome... We're having issues with word...
      - PKop 6y ago
        The less nonsensical the word in context, the more confusing it is though. Do you dispute that "we're having issues with time" is much more vague and overloaded, than "we're having issues with zoom"?

ushakov 6y ago

glad you renamed it. The Zeit i know, was able to serve Docker images

gitgud 6y ago

A shame they changed the name, I liked "Zeit". The re-branding reminds me of the browser IDE "Hyperdev" which changed to "Gomix" and finally to "Glitch"... Everytime the name changes, people care less... but I'm no businessman > [1] ...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions. [1] https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing

m00dy 6y ago

ZEIT always sounded me something from Templars.

m00dy 6y ago

I use ZEIT for my side projects now. It is extremely efficient and time saver.

matthewcford 6y ago

one of our clients uses netlify, does anyone have experience with the two platforms and how they compare on price at the enterprise levels?

iamtherhino 6y ago
Vercel/ZEIT is typically a bit cheaper in the long run for popular sites with the fixed costs. If your traffic is really light, then Netlify probably is. If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)

bengale 6y ago

Awesome. I normally work on just web apps but had to build a website recently that had some complex bits in some pages but mainly a marketing site. The experience with nextjs and deploying with zeit was brilliant. Docs are good, everything works well, just an all round good experience. Please don't break it!

marban 6y ago

From unbrandable to unpronounceable.

adriand 6y ago

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.” Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.

kreetx 6y ago
But what if this one specifically is a bad rebranding?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point? Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
- austhrow743 6y ago
  To run from a bad reputation To expand in to a market that already has a well known company by that name Hard to rank for it for search purposes Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out of
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There are various types of rebranding that may or may not involve renaming. However, with respect to renaming specifically, it often also comes about because your company name now bears no relationship to what you actually do. To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just some letters.)

neom 6y ago

Congrats Guillermo!! Vercel is awesome, can't wait to see where you take the business. Keep up the great work.

sholladay 6y ago

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/now#future-proof https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/now#why-not-aws-lambda-azure-google-cloud-functions https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

DagAgren 6y ago
Same here. Migration path to Heroku was easier than migration path to Zeit v2, and Heroku hasn't fucked me over by forcing me to migrate to an entirely new model yet.
- sholladay 6y ago
  I also went to Heroku. Icing on the cake was when I discovered that even on Heroku's free plan, we were getting significantly better performance than on Zeit's paid plan. Response times were more stable and had far less latency. Made me really happy and almost made it worth the frustration of having to migrate in the first place. Almost. Heroku has definitely improved over the years.
baxuz 6y ago
I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.
- zoul 6y ago
  For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

ezzzzz 6y ago

Literally just discovered Zeit, what I liked about it was the ability to choose different run-times, with a generous free tier, with none of the existential baggage of the other PAAS's options out there. Sigh, oh well.

mcsdev 6y ago
Everything you liked about ZEIT is present in Vercel! You can read more about it in our rebrand field book: https://www.notion.so/Vercel-Launch-1cab2369ab1c4d8db1987b68708be683 https://www.notion.so/Vercel-Launch-1cab2369ab1c4d8db1987b68...
- DagAgren 6y ago
  Everything I liked about Zeit was Now v1, so, not really?
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    It took me awhile to come to terms with the truth that "You are not their target customer." Fair enough. Except that they built their brand off the backs of people they no longer want using their platform...
    - DagAgren 6y ago
      But, even if you were their target customer... Would you feel comfortable using their service, knowing that at least once before they decided their current customers are no longer their target customers, and screwed them all over?

artur_makly 6y ago

Congrats Guille .. Vamos!!

CSSer 6y ago

I’m surprised to see so many people nagging about the brand. As one user pointed out, there’s a big newspaper brand with that name already. And otherwise, who cares, really? Same company. It’s not a soccer team.

PKop 6y ago
I think the discussion would be different if the new name was better. Replacing zeit makes sense, not sure the chosen replacement was any good.
- CSSer 6y ago
  Fair enough. I guess I know what Zeit means, but not Vercel. Maybe they just wanted the “V” to fit nicely next to the triangle? ;)

SnowingXIV 6y ago

I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites? With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the exception of forms. If this is just another choice that's good. Perhaps it's faster? I've deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but not much different than netlify's build that works with a git push. Either way, congrats on the funding! Disclaimer: I don't work for netlify, though I did interview with them awhile back.

rymate1234 6y ago
Main difference with Vercel / ZEIT is that unlike Netlify, it can more easily have SSR pages. So like if you're using NextJS for instance, on Netlify you can only really use the static site generation features of NextJS, whereas with Vercel you have SSR pages as well as the API functions. Also Vercel _can_ do full standard servers if needed, including for NodeJS https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-node-js-usage/legacy-serverful-behavior https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-nod... or Python https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-python-usage/web-server-gateway-interface https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#advanced-usage/advanced-pyt...
- pier25 6y ago
  But Netlify also has cloud functions, no?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dance2die 6y ago
    Not for SSR.
    - 6y ago

foreign-inc 6y ago

Have anyone used both https://redwoodjs.com https://redwoodjs.com and Nextjs and share their experience?

matallo 6y ago
Interested in this, too.
swyx 6y ago
ive tried out both. next.js focuses very much on the SSR/SSG job, whereas Redwood both stretches further in front of the stack (with Cells and a Form library) and further back in the stack (with Prisma/GraphQL). next is a lot more mature (5yrs?) whereas redwood is new. that help?
deltron3030 6y ago
Redwood doesn't hide their tutorial behind an account like Nextjs does, they're more user friendly. And it was impressive how smooth it went considering the underlying complexity of the tech stack.
- deltron3030 6y ago
  The Next tutorial is now available without log-in, so the statement above isn't true anymore. Thanks Vercel!

erulabs 6y ago

Congratulations on the funding Guillermo!

Touche 6y ago

What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that the founders need to align the brand with the vision... Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?

pier25 6y ago
Other than the practical reasons (Zeit is a common German word) their product and focus has changed quite a bit. They started as serverless docker and changed to CDN + edge cloud functions to specialized hosting for front end projects.

crousto 6y ago

Judging by the comments so far, the name change backlash is of unseen-since-Qwikster proportions…

mtm7 6y ago

I'm a huge fan of Zeit/Vercel's products and design. I've interacted with their team on a few occasions and they've always been nice. Plus, their mechanical keyboard is super cool... [0] I absolutely loved the name "Zeit", although I've read in this thread that it could have branding/SEO issues. I'm hoping Vercel will grow on me – right now, it sounds like a combination of "incel", "Verizon", and maybe some kind of geriatric medicine. [0]: https://vercel.com/keyboard https://vercel.com/keyboard

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bsimpson 6y ago

Looks like React's originators (Jordan Walk and Pete Hunt) are funders.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sna1l 6y ago

I had a ton of trouble getting a simple gatsby.js website running on Zeit. Kept getting useless error messages that were impossible to debug. Tried Netlify and it worked without any changes to my code. The Zeit UI might be slicker, but it definitely isn't easier to use imo.

bionhoward 6y ago

I liked Zeit but had to switch because there was no way to get IP addresses to whitelist, so Vercel customers are likely to get hacked, because they’re forced to secure their database with only a password, and no firewall. Apparently you can fix this with an “enterprise” subscription, which is a huge red flag. Open source doesn’t get secure data? Vercel is likely to get hit with huge lawsuits over that, and I’m staying well clear until it’s fixed

telotortium 6y ago
What lawsuits? Don't virtually all open-source licenses in existence disclaim any warranty or fitness for a particular purpose?
- bionhoward 6y ago
  True, and I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t care about them getting sued, I care about the fact I can’t protect customers’ data if I use Vercel
  - travltalk 6y ago
    Can speak first hand that you are right!
noxplode 6y ago
Can't you connect via SSL?

james-mcelwain 6y ago

"Jamstack" has to be the worst name for an architecture ever. "Javascript", "APIs", and "markup"... uhhh you mean like what the entire web already runs on?

tirumaraiselvan 6y ago
The goal was also probably (re)branding.
hashkb 6y ago
It stands for "Just Attempt Moving" off of our hosted service.

jariel 6y ago

Does anyone not directly involved in this kind of tech struggle to understand 'what on earth it does'? I understand vaguely from the marketing copy, but it's still pretty fuzzy. Here is their front page copy: "Develop. Preview. Ship. Vercel is the optimal workflow for frontend teams. All-in-one: Static and Jamstack deployment, Serverless Functions, and Global CDN." This doesn't really say a whole lot. Then we have these little bits: "Zero config Works out of the box with any web framework." Great, but what is it, and what does it do? "instant static deploys Push to Git and your website is live. Zero configuration required." So this is starting to make some sense - does this mean this technology will grab my github changes to push specific files to where I've hosted them? They ask me to 'import a project' and yet I have idea what that means. Here is the 'intro' in docs: [1] "Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration." That explains next to nothing. Terminology like 'Jamstack' is still very new and niche, I suggest outside of certain bubbles, very few people understand what that means, so the site is using language that is foreign to most readers. This is not going to work very well. ... It would be nice to think I'm a little slow, but I don't think I am - I think a large portion of today's marketing and communications is a little rubbish: it fails to explain within any reasonable detail 'what it is, what it does, why I would want it' and provide ultra-basic 'hello world' examples that explain the nature of the system. This is a problem. There are new techs released every day, I'm tired of struggling through weird non-explanations of various platforms just to get the basic idea of even what it does, this is something companies should focus on. [1] https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs