14 ms·

Vercel raise $40M Series B

350 points by sdan 6y ago

flyinglizard 6y ago
From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic. We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores. [1] https://littleastronauts.com https://littleastronauts.com
- Pandabob 6y ago
  I've been wondering about this exact combo for a while. Your site looks nice. Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    Thanks! We developed from scratch, I frankly wasn’t aware of the template when we started but also wanted a very specific look and feel (and the whole planet section on the bottom of the welcome page obviously had lots of work). Not aware of any issues. We did quite a tight integration with Shopify such as the entire website shop is 99% generated from the Shopify items (which in turn are generated from the Print On Demand catalogues. It’s turtles all the way down).
    - keslert 6y ago
      I have a site (https://familytreechart.com https://familytreechart.com) with a similar integration with Shopify but one thing I've never figured out is how to send someone to Shopify's checkout page with a preconfigured cart. It looks like you are managing the cart on the nextjs side. How are you generating the checkout page with the right items? I've resorted to creating a DraftOrder, but those don't allow for discount codes so I also had to handle that on my end when creating the draft order. Email in profile if easier.
      - RobDukarski 6y ago
        There are cart permalinks [1] that you could use but depending on how much you want to pre-populate I recommend using the JS Buy SDK. I found it the other day and set up a custom free gift with discount code for a Shopify Plus client. The discount code uses the BOGO but the custom functionality checks the conditions and adds the product(s) to the checkout if it is not already there then applies the discount (the client wanted to use the discount code to add the free gift instead of a permalink). You can add to cart, then add the discount, then redirect to checkout all within one link (working on an app to help merchants generate them).. I believe that is the proper flow but I cannot remember off the top of my head I just know that is all currently possible with a single link. That said, I have been made aware that the checkout experience will be changing next year. I'm not sure what that entails yet just that it is coming. Also, having worked with Shopify rather heavily since August, I love it. [1] https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Cart-Use-permalinks-to-pre-load-the-cart/td-p/613702 https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Cart-Use-perm...
        keslert 6y ago
        Thanks for the suggestions! I hadn't seen the cart permalinks before, but that might work well for us.
- juliann1 6y ago
  Hey thats a really nice website! congrats :)
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    She’ll be happy to hear - we’ve just launched last week :)
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  wow that's so awesome, if I had kids I'd totally buy something haha
- byhemechi 6y ago
  The website looks excellent but the perf could really do with some work. After a quick look in the profiler I found that you're eager loading full-res images from shopify, and it's adding quite a bit of time before the page fully paints, with a lot of reflow. I'd recommend lazyloading them after the fact, with a super low res version as a background-image and adding a min-height to the images so that the whole page doesn't reflow as much. Otherwise a great site and good looking products, If I had kids I'd buy a shirt.
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    Really appreciate the feedback. We’ll try this!
talolard 6y ago
Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened
- Jestar342 6y ago
  Vercel also supports Gatsby deployments. Well, they have an option when setting up the repo integration at least. My team has just started a Next.js app. I chose Next.js over Gatsby because on the face of it, Gatsby looked like a lot more configuration. I fully expect we'll "disagree" with Next.js at some point but for now I am really liking that it is opinionated, as it it letting us build really quickly.
- nobody0 6y ago
  Can relate, next.js is more progressive while Gatsby get things done so quick at first, but you find yourself in a dark room of settings, let along GraphQL.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    This happened to me. And the graphql proponents that know gql love it but it’s so slow to build. I love Hugo and I wish there was a middle ground that was more approachable. I might have to try next.
    - tnolet 6y ago
      We run a Hugo site on Vercel. Works fine
    - richeyryan 6y ago
      I setup my personal blog recently. Tried Gatsby and decided I didn't want to spend the time tweaking it so just used Hugo. Ended up deploying it on Vercel and its been so easy. I have less excuses for not writing blog posts now :)
- 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
Vercel communications team: I watched your quasi-live streaming presentation/announcement several weeks ago, and could barely fathom what anyone was talking about. Was it your intention to completely talk over everyone's head by using arcane or invented abstractions? Trying to make investors feel they are onto something really advanced? Or just caught up in VC/SV speak? Because products that nobody understands have a harder time taking root in the commons. Edit: Literally there is a question above (top at this time) 'What is Vercel?' - this is my point, a communications failure. If people Googling 'Vercel' and not getting the answer very quickly, then it's a communications problem. Speak in plain English, describe 'what it is' and the direct material value.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- whalesalad 6y ago
  I think you need a Snickers.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Vercel CEO needs to speak in plain English, it would help his effort quite a lot.
- jack_riminton 6y ago
  I would also appreciate an explanation of what it is because after 10 mins on their site I still can't pin it down
  - naavis 6y ago
    The front-page is pretty unclear, but if you open the documentation page, it is fairly clear: https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs > 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.
throwaway998663 6y ago
Congrats! I've been using vercel for a month now and it's just so nice and easy to use; without sacrificing performance/flexibility. I hope they don't lose the ease of use as they get bigger, like so many other similar products
adim86 6y ago
Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
- bob33212 6y ago
  Looks like hosting your site via your Git repo. Make a change in Git and they will push it to their servers ( probably AWS linux cluster)
- ncrmro 6y ago
  Next is a server side rendered framework for react apps. Next is made by Vercel. They also have an option to staticly rendered certain pages. They netlify but for next. Also next usually requires a node server so technically can also act as an api. Can generate a server less bundle.
- tgdn 6y ago
  With Vercel you can easily deploy a static/SSR app in minutes, either using their NextJS framework or any other JS/TS framework. It also provides serverless API endpoints capabilities with other languages (Python, Node, Go, Ruby). Most of this comes with a great free tier (including bandwidth which is unlimited). Team accounts allow your team to collaborate, deploy, run analytics etc seamlessly. It's great, they've done a great job. I might be forgetting a couple of things, but this is a big part of why they are so successful.
- seveibar 6y ago
  Vercel is a serverless platform like AWS Lambda or Netlify. Run your API endpoints and your client application on it but your database elsewhere. They'll make deploying your website one command but take care of an enormous amount of developer operations, including dev/staging/production environments, secrets management, server scaling, and https certificates.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    Vercel is like Netlify, but I would not say it is "like AWS Lambda". Vercel a deployment + hosting platforms for static websites and "serverless" functions, but Lambda extends past what Vercel/Netlify is for. In terms of actual hosting (removing the build/deployment pipeline), Vercel is a subset of AWS Lambda.
deleted 6y ago
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seveibar 6y ago
I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependencies won't operate in a serverless environment. I have a set of critiques just like any infrastructure user, but by and large Vercel is moving in the right direction and I'm looking forward to seeing them succeed! [1] My bill running CollegeAI.com on Kubernetes went from $600/mo to $20/mo with Vercel. It required a large refactor to serverless and the initial week of deployment the performance was so much better I got a massive traffic spike that increased my traffic from tens to thousands of daily signups. The bill that month was over $1000 because I didn't have the serverless parameters set up totally correctly.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.
  - tomlin 6y ago
    He's an employee of Versel. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of "experiences"
    - ketamine__ 6y ago
      Is he?
      - texasbigdata 6y ago
        Based on his HN linked Twitter and his LinkedIn from googling his name, that does not appear to be the case at all. Not sure why someone would lob an accusation like that.
        6y ago
kylehotchkiss 6y ago
Many congrats Vercel! I've been a big fan since Zeit platform version 1 - I remember the transition to platform version 2 was difficult but over time I can see how incredible of a platform you've become. Just a note from a fan - I hope you all can determine a way to approach the future with longevity and corporate independence. The web really needs your entire teams dedication towards performance, end user experience, and developer experience in the coming years. I would love to see Vercel as an independent entity a decade from now and witness how your philosophy changes the web in that time!
- akuji1993 6y ago
  > avoid being acquired Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.
  - swyx 6y ago
    > Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. not a very intellectually honest statement to make considering founder supervoting shares are extremely common in tech.
    - andrewingram 6y ago
      extremely common, common, or merely not that unusual? I don’t actually know, but I was struck by the hyperbole in a comment essentially complaining about hyperbole.
    - abcdefg911 6y ago
      fdadfadsfdsf
    - tomp 6y ago
      How long will that persist? Any such company has no chance of being included in e.g. S&P 500 so there's clearly strong pressure in the opposite direction...
BossingAround 6y ago
> Airbnb’s engineering team, for example, isn’t a heavy user of Next.js yet, but they are a world-class team of designers, engineers, product managers, and marketers. This is a semantically null sentence for the purposes of your article. Skip it and you'd have the same meaning without sounding like you're sucking up to a company. > Hashicorp pushed back on the dogmatism of pure static. Their team is laser-focused on the user experience. They don’t care if an application is CSR, SSR, SSG, etc. as long as their end-user is delighted. This has no meaning to me, personally. If Hashicorp doesn't care about pure static as long as their "end-user is delighted," why did they push back? Was there some kind of drama you're revealing? How is "end-user delight" related to any of the acronyms? Are you suggesting pure static pages "delight" fewer users? The writing is pretty bad. Funnily enough, on the webpage they link from the "CSR, SSR, SSG" string doesn't contain the words "CSR" or "SSG", so it doesn't explain much unless you have the time to read the whole page.
- swyx 6y ago
  it makes sense to people like me who have been following the vercel story closely, but youre right in that this press release probably should have been written with a much more contextless audience in mind. re: hashicorp - jeff escalante their web team lead gave a talk on their move recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNP3PSLT2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNP3PSLT2Q
yboris 6y ago
Shout out to Vercel (formerly Zeit) for their awesome Hyper terminal https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ I love Vercel - it runs several of my Gatsby sites and an Angular website for free. It also builds out my PRs so I can see how the website is changed. If ever I need to use their paid tier, I'll do it.
chrshawkes 6y ago
No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.
- swyx 6y ago
  how many times do we need to link to the dropbox comment before HN commenters get it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - joshuakelly 6y ago
    Forever? If it made sense to everyone, there would be no upside. The very nature of an innovative idea is that few people see it.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    Dropbox is for end-users, this is for developers. At least I guess it is, haven't been able to figure out exactly what they offer.
    - paxys 6y ago
      Developers are end users as well
      - Grustaf 6y ago
        Well, how about “dropbox is aimed at the general population of computer users, and not just computer savvy developers”?
        PKop 6y ago
        Vercel is aimed at the general population of web developers, not just the savvy ones like you
bdickason 6y ago
Congrats team - excellent product! I e used it since Zeit and absolutely love it.
gcatalfamo 6y ago
For the last two projects I really wanted to use Vercel but there is something about its interface that makes me unable to understand it. I ended up both times on Netlify instead. Is it me not being a dev by trade or it happens also to others?
colinbartlett 6y ago
Glad to see this because we just started using Vercel for StatusGator. Their API is great: we were able to automate deployments of branded status dashboards very quickly. There are some rough edges around domain name management but overall the experience is very developer-friendly, analogous to Heroku but for a different architecture.
- giovannibonetti 6y ago
  > but overall the experience is very developer-friendly, analogous to Heroku but for a different architecture. Just to elaborate on that, Vercel is awesome for stateless apps - specially front-end apps. Heroku excels on (small scale) statefull apps - like the back-end app connected to a database (add-on). In my previous company we used both Vercel and Heroku, which was a great match. Both of them have Review Apps, for example.
buybackoff 6y ago
It's ironic that the blog of next.js creators is not opening when cookies/localStorage are disabled. For two years I have whitelisted sites in the main browser and have a separate browser where everything is enabled but cleaned on close, so that I could read broken websites. I hope "the next web" they are building just works in a single browser without cookies/tracking at least for blogs/news.
syamilmj 6y ago
Had to use Zeit/Vercel a few months for a “serious” project that requires SSR, caching and multiple staging environments. As the project progresses I noticed an increasing pain from constantly fighting with outdated documentations and limited configurability. I hope that’s changed now though, because there were some parts of Zeit that we loved. For simpler static sites, it’s hard to beat Netlify.
- nfRfqX5n 6y ago
  the docs could definitely use some work. there's a ton of nuance in advanced nextjs apps and the docs usually have the answer i am looking for, but it's tough to find it
ignoramous 6y ago
u/rauchg grew zeit.co (Now) [0][1] -> next.js [2] -> Vercel [3] iteratively over 3 years to raise Series A and B within 8 months of each other. Along the way, showing how OSS businesses can win: Slowly but steadily (looking at you mesosphere). Congrats to everyone at Vercel! God knows it has taken very many pivots to finally reach here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320489 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407503 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788922 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933479
- swyx 6y ago
  the timing of the A and B are certainly unusual. curious what changed and whether it was "a formula starting to work" or "need cash" or "pre emptive B". i guess it's not really any of my business but it'd be nice to know.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  About Mesosphere: Mesosphere was started by Berkeley PhD interned at Google Borg. They worked on some exploratory project to expand the capabilities of Borg platform and wrote some paper. Unfortunately, that project was on a slightly skewed direction of the technical trend. The philosophy and direction embodied in that project was neither useful inside Google, nor it matches the industry trend. But nonetheless an interesting improvement. With the reputation of the group and relationship they decided to start a company. And once docker is out, and kubernetrd next, in 2014 many have seen that mesos the technology is bound to irrelevance. That prediction verified itself rather quickly, when mesosphere rebranded itself d2iq.
4778468d 6y ago
Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really great time concentrating super hard looking super close at how fast things are. The thing we do lets you do the best thing you do. Ah, now it’s crystal clear what Vercel is.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  That's not surprising - lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. It was pretty easy to just click "Documentation" and see more: https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs > 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. Seems fairly clear what it does.
  - higerordermap 6y ago
    > lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. This one is better than most zero information PR lines. For what it is worth the statement can't be written by GPT-3.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    Do you think it's reasonable for someone arriving at the website with the very common question of "what exactly do they do?" to click the "Documentation" link?
    - ink404 6y ago
      For a developer audience, yes. For a non technical audience, no.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
I like vercel and use it for all my projects, but in light of the goal of helping everyone build the next web, I think it would make a lot of sense to enable drag and drop deploy, like netlify. I recently tried to show someone who used windows and had neither node nor git installed how to deploy a static website with vercel, but it was such a pain that we ended up using netlify.
meagher 6y ago
I love using Vercel. It’s impressive what they’ve built in Open Source and their own product with a relatively small team. Microsoft/GitHub could be a good landing spot for them if they are to sell.
assinator 6y ago
Didn't they just raise a series A like 5 minutes ago? Burned through the 20 mil already? Sounds very promising
joshuakelly 6y ago
A very happy customer of Vercel here, and a Next.js user. Vercel makes it really easy to deploy isomorphic JavaScript applications, to the point where I barely have to think about the runtime context. Thinking back to the ~2015 era, it feels like magic in comparison.
liminal 6y ago
I'm trying to decipher what this is. So far I've learned there's a thing called "Jamstack" that seems to be about static websites. How does one manage databases with this technology?
- aoeusnth1 6y ago
  I think the idea is that instead of generating the original http content based on your DB, you have static webpages which have JavaScript call out to your dB-backed API to modify the content in an SPA. This can then be made more efficient with automatic server side rendering.
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  I run a super small site, so all the data is compiled at build time into JSON files and served using serverless/lambda (e.g. short server-side functions). The data I'm getting from Notion and Airtable, so I don't have to run a "real" DB. For commenting I'm experimenting with services like Fauna and Supabase
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  You either generate pages at build time from the data or you build a static page that will fetch the data from the client. This means you have zero server side rendering, you're just serving up static files, which of course is faster and can utilize CDNs and such. SSR is also still possible, that would basically give you a classic model of fetching data on request and then rendering the page. My impression is that this is meant more as a transition than a preferred option. The SSR features are also optimised to the point that the data fetching and rendering is decoupled. So a client side (JS) navigation only needs to fetch the new page's data. The DX around this is super smooth (just expose an async function...)
js4ever 6y ago
When I see how much they raised I wonder how long it will take before they get acquired and shutdown by Google or another big predator
tomlin 6y ago
"Raise" How am I going to educate my child on the value of /value/, when this is a term with serious meaning?
fillipvt 6y ago
With AWS CDK and Amplify developing at the speeds they currently are, I think businesses like Vercel will have it really hard in the coming years to attract customers. Happy for them though! I've been using them for a long time, but I've also just started learning CDK and Amplify and I think these could provide the same benefits, and in some (very specific) cases with zero costs. This plus databases such as Fauna or DynamoDB, and I wouldn't be able to see my self using any other thing for a good long while.
laczi 6y ago
NextJS is awesome, but vercel as a business still doesn't seem to make sense to me. There is a free tier and then pricing starts at $20/user/month. For unlimited usage in deploying and consuming static/generated/rendered content and APIs. iiuc, vercel runs on aws. Isn't the math fundamentally flawed on this kind of a business model if it isn't backed by owning the compute/network substrate first? Egress charges would be brutal. Targetting gross margins of 60-70% sounds like it would be hard. Would love to hear from VC/founders with their insights, esp for building dev tools businesses and "monetizing" frameworks which isn't something that's happened too often (or happened at all recently?)
- duhi88 6y ago
  I feels like Heroku 8 years ago. Cheap to get started, but I never recommended it for startups with a tight budget. You can get stuck with an architecture that becomes very expensive very quickly, and that scares me.
- jeffshek 6y ago
  It's a common startup strategy to have free plans that lock in initial customers and then raise prices later and/or remove the free plans. At that point, you're using customer growth as your primary metric to investors and thus raising money.
- nfRfqX5n 6y ago
  enterprise support
snicksnak 6y ago
judging by the url ("the next web") I expected something related to web3 or p2p and then was kinda disappointed to see yet another react framework. Side note: somehow my ISP (vodafone) has problems delivering me this domain, only was able to visit via opera with their vpn enabled.
elitan 6y ago
Congratulations. Well deserved to an awesome service and company!
b212 6y ago
Great! It might sound lame, but: - in early 2000s I couldn't live without JavaScript & animated gifs ;), - in late 2000s I couldn't live without jQuery, - in early 2010s I couldn't live without React, - in late 2010s I can't live without Next.js. It's an amazing platform and it's been an amazing experience. Everything "just works", and not having to fiddle with webpack or any other build tools is a blessing. I'm amazed by Next.js, the only thing what worries me a little is we have JS and on top of it sits React and on top of React we have Next.js... Anyway I think I've rediscovered React because of Next.js, I was tired of React at some point and they just saved me from a burnout I suppose. Keep up the good work! I think eventually FB might want to buy them out and merge React with Next.js. I don't want to sound embittered but I've had multiple "why wasn't this working like that by default in React?!" moments.
- elitan 6y ago
  Next.js is open source so if FB would want to merge React with Next.js I think they can do that anytime.
zaiste 6y ago
Congrats Guillermo and the whole team at Vercel! Initially I was a bit skeptical about Next.js, but nowadays I really like this all-in-one experience. There are still some rough edges, but it's understandable given the scope of this project. I'd love to see more focus on TypeScript, integration with something like esbuild or Snowpack or maybe even a Deno version (there's already Aleph.js). What may not be obvious at first glance is their dedication to solve those little, often difficult problems on the web. I like their next/image component. I was surprised to see AMP support. Their approach for blending frontend with backend is not only interesting, but practical. The future will be interesting for sure. Contrary to other commenters, I find Next.js docs pretty good. You can see there was a lot of effort put into writing their tutorial. Rough edges are mostly related to everything that supplements the framework, i.e. 3rd party libraries. I think eventually they will be expanding to cover these various scenarios. Also, I'm working on a 12-week video course about React.js / Next.js. When I noticed this announcement on HN, I figured it could be a good way to promote it. ;) It's not yet ready (early WIP). I plan to finalize details next week. So if you're looking for a React.js/Next.js jump-start, check it out at https://reactnextaz.com https://reactnextaz.com
- olnluis 6y ago
  Yeah, the attention to the little details, and developer comfort, is what makes Vercel great. I was a little disappointed, though, when they released the new Image component and it didn't seem to support AMP sites out of the box :(. I had to write my own wrapper function.
gazelleeatslion 6y ago
Congrats to these folks! Absolutely killing it and great product. Hopefully it doesn't get harder and harder to use Next.js on anything but Vercel.
aabbccsmith 6y ago
This is really well deserved — vercel is a brilliant company + an amazing product.
wdb 6y ago
Personally, I am quite interested in Remix (see: https://remix.run https://remix.run) which seems to be more flexible and does support not using Javascript in the final output but still leverage the convenience of React (personal opinion). Maybe Next.js would move a bit towards this approach too It's not free, though
BryanBeshore 6y ago
The one thing I dislike about Vercel is that you need to go all in or nothing with it. Say you have a micro-frontend strategy and would like part of your front-end in next.js; you can't. Overall I really am impressed with Vercel, though. It's been a fun project/company to work with.
- leerob 6y ago
  I have great news – you can do that! https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption
byhemechi 6y ago
I've using Vercel since 1.0, when it was called ZEIT now. it's amazing, especially for next.js. It's great to see that a lot of other people agree.
haltingproblem 6y ago
I see a lot of excitement around the product but no idea of what service Vercel provides. Can someone explain (ELI5) or for python/django folks what Vercel does.
fajarsiddiqfs 6y ago
Congratulations! Future of JAMstack is awesome! ;)

350 points by sdan 6y ago

From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic. We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores. [1] https://littleastronauts.com https://littleastronauts.com

Pandabob 6y ago
I've been wondering about this exact combo for a while. Your site looks nice. Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  Thanks! We developed from scratch, I frankly wasn’t aware of the template when we started but also wanted a very specific look and feel (and the whole planet section on the bottom of the welcome page obviously had lots of work). Not aware of any issues. We did quite a tight integration with Shopify such as the entire website shop is 99% generated from the Shopify items (which in turn are generated from the Print On Demand catalogues. It’s turtles all the way down).
  - keslert 6y ago
    I have a site (https://familytreechart.com https://familytreechart.com) with a similar integration with Shopify but one thing I've never figured out is how to send someone to Shopify's checkout page with a preconfigured cart. It looks like you are managing the cart on the nextjs side. How are you generating the checkout page with the right items? I've resorted to creating a DraftOrder, but those don't allow for discount codes so I also had to handle that on my end when creating the draft order. Email in profile if easier.
    - RobDukarski 6y ago
      There are cart permalinks [1] that you could use but depending on how much you want to pre-populate I recommend using the JS Buy SDK. I found it the other day and set up a custom free gift with discount code for a Shopify Plus client. The discount code uses the BOGO but the custom functionality checks the conditions and adds the product(s) to the checkout if it is not already there then applies the discount (the client wanted to use the discount code to add the free gift instead of a permalink). You can add to cart, then add the discount, then redirect to checkout all within one link (working on an app to help merchants generate them).. I believe that is the proper flow but I cannot remember off the top of my head I just know that is all currently possible with a single link. That said, I have been made aware that the checkout experience will be changing next year. I'm not sure what that entails yet just that it is coming. Also, having worked with Shopify rather heavily since August, I love it. [1] https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Cart-Use-permalinks-to-pre-load-the-cart/td-p/613702 https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Cart-Use-perm...
      - keslert 6y ago
        Thanks for the suggestions! I hadn't seen the cart permalinks before, but that might work well for us.
juliann1 6y ago
Hey thats a really nice website! congrats :)
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  She’ll be happy to hear - we’ve just launched last week :)
yawnxyz 6y ago
wow that's so awesome, if I had kids I'd totally buy something haha
byhemechi 6y ago
The website looks excellent but the perf could really do with some work. After a quick look in the profiler I found that you're eager loading full-res images from shopify, and it's adding quite a bit of time before the page fully paints, with a lot of reflow. I'd recommend lazyloading them after the fact, with a super low res version as a background-image and adding a min-height to the images so that the whole page doesn't reflow as much. Otherwise a great site and good looking products, If I had kids I'd buy a shirt.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  Really appreciate the feedback. We’ll try this!

talolard 6y ago

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

Jestar342 6y ago
Vercel also supports Gatsby deployments. Well, they have an option when setting up the repo integration at least. My team has just started a Next.js app. I chose Next.js over Gatsby because on the face of it, Gatsby looked like a lot more configuration. I fully expect we'll "disagree" with Next.js at some point but for now I am really liking that it is opinionated, as it it letting us build really quickly.
nobody0 6y ago
Can relate, next.js is more progressive while Gatsby get things done so quick at first, but you find yourself in a dark room of settings, let along GraphQL.
- leetrout 6y ago
  This happened to me. And the graphql proponents that know gql love it but it’s so slow to build. I love Hugo and I wish there was a middle ground that was more approachable. I might have to try next.
  - tnolet 6y ago
    We run a Hugo site on Vercel. Works fine
  - richeyryan 6y ago
    I setup my personal blog recently. Tried Gatsby and decided I didn't want to spend the time tweaking it so just used Hugo. Ended up deploying it on Vercel and its been so easy. I have less excuses for not writing blog posts now :)
6y ago

jariel 6y ago

Vercel communications team: I watched your quasi-live streaming presentation/announcement several weeks ago, and could barely fathom what anyone was talking about. Was it your intention to completely talk over everyone's head by using arcane or invented abstractions? Trying to make investors feel they are onto something really advanced? Or just caught up in VC/SV speak? Because products that nobody understands have a harder time taking root in the commons. Edit: Literally there is a question above (top at this time) 'What is Vercel?' - this is my point, a communications failure. If people Googling 'Vercel' and not getting the answer very quickly, then it's a communications problem. Speak in plain English, describe 'what it is' and the direct material value.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 6y ago
I think you need a Snickers.
- jariel 6y ago
  Vercel CEO needs to speak in plain English, it would help his effort quite a lot.
jack_riminton 6y ago
I would also appreciate an explanation of what it is because after 10 mins on their site I still can't pin it down
- naavis 6y ago
  The front-page is pretty unclear, but if you open the documentation page, it is fairly clear: https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs > 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.

throwaway998663 6y ago

Congrats! I've been using vercel for a month now and it's just so nice and easy to use; without sacrificing performance/flexibility. I hope they don't lose the ease of use as they get bigger, like so many other similar products

adim86 6y ago

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

bob33212 6y ago
Looks like hosting your site via your Git repo. Make a change in Git and they will push it to their servers ( probably AWS linux cluster)
ncrmro 6y ago
Next is a server side rendered framework for react apps. Next is made by Vercel. They also have an option to staticly rendered certain pages. They netlify but for next. Also next usually requires a node server so technically can also act as an api. Can generate a server less bundle.
tgdn 6y ago
With Vercel you can easily deploy a static/SSR app in minutes, either using their NextJS framework or any other JS/TS framework. It also provides serverless API endpoints capabilities with other languages (Python, Node, Go, Ruby). Most of this comes with a great free tier (including bandwidth which is unlimited). Team accounts allow your team to collaborate, deploy, run analytics etc seamlessly. It's great, they've done a great job. I might be forgetting a couple of things, but this is a big part of why they are so successful.
seveibar 6y ago
Vercel is a serverless platform like AWS Lambda or Netlify. Run your API endpoints and your client application on it but your database elsewhere. They'll make deploying your website one command but take care of an enormous amount of developer operations, including dev/staging/production environments, secrets management, server scaling, and https certificates.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Vercel is like Netlify, but I would not say it is "like AWS Lambda". Vercel a deployment + hosting platforms for static websites and "serverless" functions, but Lambda extends past what Vercel/Netlify is for. In terms of actual hosting (removing the build/deployment pipeline), Vercel is a subset of AWS Lambda.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

seveibar 6y ago

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependencies won't operate in a serverless environment. I have a set of critiques just like any infrastructure user, but by and large Vercel is moving in the right direction and I'm looking forward to seeing them succeed! [1] My bill running CollegeAI.com on Kubernetes went from $600/mo to $20/mo with Vercel. It required a large refactor to serverless and the initial week of deployment the performance was so much better I got a massive traffic spike that increased my traffic from tens to thousands of daily signups. The bill that month was over $1000 because I didn't have the serverless parameters set up totally correctly.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.
- tomlin 6y ago
  He's an employee of Versel. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of "experiences"
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Is he?
    - texasbigdata 6y ago
      Based on his HN linked Twitter and his LinkedIn from googling his name, that does not appear to be the case at all. Not sure why someone would lob an accusation like that.
      - 6y ago

kylehotchkiss 6y ago

Many congrats Vercel! I've been a big fan since Zeit platform version 1 - I remember the transition to platform version 2 was difficult but over time I can see how incredible of a platform you've become. Just a note from a fan - I hope you all can determine a way to approach the future with longevity and corporate independence. The web really needs your entire teams dedication towards performance, end user experience, and developer experience in the coming years. I would love to see Vercel as an independent entity a decade from now and witness how your philosophy changes the web in that time!

akuji1993 6y ago
> avoid being acquired Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.
- swyx 6y ago
  > Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. not a very intellectually honest statement to make considering founder supervoting shares are extremely common in tech.
  - andrewingram 6y ago
    extremely common, common, or merely not that unusual? I don’t actually know, but I was struck by the hyperbole in a comment essentially complaining about hyperbole.
  - abcdefg911 6y ago
    fdadfadsfdsf
  - tomp 6y ago
    How long will that persist? Any such company has no chance of being included in e.g. S&P 500 so there's clearly strong pressure in the opposite direction...

BossingAround 6y ago

> Airbnb’s engineering team, for example, isn’t a heavy user of Next.js yet, but they are a world-class team of designers, engineers, product managers, and marketers. This is a semantically null sentence for the purposes of your article. Skip it and you'd have the same meaning without sounding like you're sucking up to a company. > Hashicorp pushed back on the dogmatism of pure static. Their team is laser-focused on the user experience. They don’t care if an application is CSR, SSR, SSG, etc. as long as their end-user is delighted. This has no meaning to me, personally. If Hashicorp doesn't care about pure static as long as their "end-user is delighted," why did they push back? Was there some kind of drama you're revealing? How is "end-user delight" related to any of the acronyms? Are you suggesting pure static pages "delight" fewer users? The writing is pretty bad. Funnily enough, on the webpage they link from the "CSR, SSR, SSG" string doesn't contain the words "CSR" or "SSG", so it doesn't explain much unless you have the time to read the whole page.

swyx 6y ago
it makes sense to people like me who have been following the vercel story closely, but youre right in that this press release probably should have been written with a much more contextless audience in mind. re: hashicorp - jeff escalante their web team lead gave a talk on their move recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNP3PSLT2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNP3PSLT2Q

yboris 6y ago

Shout out to Vercel (formerly Zeit) for their awesome Hyper terminal https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ I love Vercel - it runs several of my Gatsby sites and an Angular website for free. It also builds out my PRs so I can see how the website is changed. If ever I need to use their paid tier, I'll do it.

chrshawkes 6y ago

No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.

swyx 6y ago
how many times do we need to link to the dropbox comment before HN commenters get it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- joshuakelly 6y ago
  Forever? If it made sense to everyone, there would be no upside. The very nature of an innovative idea is that few people see it.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Dropbox is for end-users, this is for developers. At least I guess it is, haven't been able to figure out exactly what they offer.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Developers are end users as well
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      Well, how about “dropbox is aimed at the general population of computer users, and not just computer savvy developers”?
      - PKop 6y ago
        Vercel is aimed at the general population of web developers, not just the savvy ones like you

bdickason 6y ago

Congrats team - excellent product! I e used it since Zeit and absolutely love it.

gcatalfamo 6y ago

For the last two projects I really wanted to use Vercel but there is something about its interface that makes me unable to understand it. I ended up both times on Netlify instead. Is it me not being a dev by trade or it happens also to others?

colinbartlett 6y ago

Glad to see this because we just started using Vercel for StatusGator. Their API is great: we were able to automate deployments of branded status dashboards very quickly. There are some rough edges around domain name management but overall the experience is very developer-friendly, analogous to Heroku but for a different architecture.

giovannibonetti 6y ago
> but overall the experience is very developer-friendly, analogous to Heroku but for a different architecture. Just to elaborate on that, Vercel is awesome for stateless apps - specially front-end apps. Heroku excels on (small scale) statefull apps - like the back-end app connected to a database (add-on). In my previous company we used both Vercel and Heroku, which was a great match. Both of them have Review Apps, for example.

buybackoff 6y ago

It's ironic that the blog of next.js creators is not opening when cookies/localStorage are disabled. For two years I have whitelisted sites in the main browser and have a separate browser where everything is enabled but cleaned on close, so that I could read broken websites. I hope "the next web" they are building just works in a single browser without cookies/tracking at least for blogs/news.

syamilmj 6y ago

Had to use Zeit/Vercel a few months for a “serious” project that requires SSR, caching and multiple staging environments. As the project progresses I noticed an increasing pain from constantly fighting with outdated documentations and limited configurability. I hope that’s changed now though, because there were some parts of Zeit that we loved. For simpler static sites, it’s hard to beat Netlify.

nfRfqX5n 6y ago
the docs could definitely use some work. there's a ton of nuance in advanced nextjs apps and the docs usually have the answer i am looking for, but it's tough to find it

ignoramous 6y ago

u/rauchg grew zeit.co (Now) [0][1] -> next.js [2] -> Vercel [3] iteratively over 3 years to raise Series A and B within 8 months of each other. Along the way, showing how OSS businesses can win: Slowly but steadily (looking at you mesosphere). Congrats to everyone at Vercel! God knows it has taken very many pivots to finally reach here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320489 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18407503 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788922 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933479

swyx 6y ago
the timing of the A and B are certainly unusual. curious what changed and whether it was "a formula starting to work" or "need cash" or "pre emptive B". i guess it's not really any of my business but it'd be nice to know.
justicezyx 6y ago
About Mesosphere: Mesosphere was started by Berkeley PhD interned at Google Borg. They worked on some exploratory project to expand the capabilities of Borg platform and wrote some paper. Unfortunately, that project was on a slightly skewed direction of the technical trend. The philosophy and direction embodied in that project was neither useful inside Google, nor it matches the industry trend. But nonetheless an interesting improvement. With the reputation of the group and relationship they decided to start a company. And once docker is out, and kubernetrd next, in 2014 many have seen that mesos the technology is bound to irrelevance. That prediction verified itself rather quickly, when mesosphere rebranded itself d2iq.

4778468d 6y ago

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really great time concentrating super hard looking super close at how fast things are. The thing we do lets you do the best thing you do. Ah, now it’s crystal clear what Vercel is.

staticassertion 6y ago
That's not surprising - lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. It was pretty easy to just click "Documentation" and see more: https://vercel.com/docs https://vercel.com/docs > 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. Seems fairly clear what it does.
- higerordermap 6y ago
  > lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. This one is better than most zero information PR lines. For what it is worth the statement can't be written by GPT-3.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  Do you think it's reasonable for someone arriving at the website with the very common question of "what exactly do they do?" to click the "Documentation" link?
  - ink404 6y ago
    For a developer audience, yes. For a non technical audience, no.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

I like vercel and use it for all my projects, but in light of the goal of helping everyone build the next web, I think it would make a lot of sense to enable drag and drop deploy, like netlify. I recently tried to show someone who used windows and had neither node nor git installed how to deploy a static website with vercel, but it was such a pain that we ended up using netlify.

meagher 6y ago

I love using Vercel. It’s impressive what they’ve built in Open Source and their own product with a relatively small team. Microsoft/GitHub could be a good landing spot for them if they are to sell.

assinator 6y ago

Didn't they just raise a series A like 5 minutes ago? Burned through the 20 mil already? Sounds very promising

joshuakelly 6y ago

A very happy customer of Vercel here, and a Next.js user. Vercel makes it really easy to deploy isomorphic JavaScript applications, to the point where I barely have to think about the runtime context. Thinking back to the ~2015 era, it feels like magic in comparison.

liminal 6y ago

I'm trying to decipher what this is. So far I've learned there's a thing called "Jamstack" that seems to be about static websites. How does one manage databases with this technology?

aoeusnth1 6y ago
I think the idea is that instead of generating the original http content based on your DB, you have static webpages which have JavaScript call out to your dB-backed API to modify the content in an SPA. This can then be made more efficient with automatic server side rendering.
yawnxyz 6y ago
I run a super small site, so all the data is compiled at build time into JSON files and served using serverless/lambda (e.g. short server-side functions). The data I'm getting from Notion and Airtable, so I don't have to run a "real" DB. For commenting I'm experimenting with services like Fauna and Supabase
Griffinsauce 6y ago
You either generate pages at build time from the data or you build a static page that will fetch the data from the client. This means you have zero server side rendering, you're just serving up static files, which of course is faster and can utilize CDNs and such. SSR is also still possible, that would basically give you a classic model of fetching data on request and then rendering the page. My impression is that this is meant more as a transition than a preferred option. The SSR features are also optimised to the point that the data fetching and rendering is decoupled. So a client side (JS) navigation only needs to fetch the new page's data. The DX around this is super smooth (just expose an async function...)

js4ever 6y ago

When I see how much they raised I wonder how long it will take before they get acquired and shutdown by Google or another big predator

tomlin 6y ago

"Raise" How am I going to educate my child on the value of /value/, when this is a term with serious meaning?

fillipvt 6y ago

With AWS CDK and Amplify developing at the speeds they currently are, I think businesses like Vercel will have it really hard in the coming years to attract customers. Happy for them though! I've been using them for a long time, but I've also just started learning CDK and Amplify and I think these could provide the same benefits, and in some (very specific) cases with zero costs. This plus databases such as Fauna or DynamoDB, and I wouldn't be able to see my self using any other thing for a good long while.

laczi 6y ago

NextJS is awesome, but vercel as a business still doesn't seem to make sense to me. There is a free tier and then pricing starts at $20/user/month. For unlimited usage in deploying and consuming static/generated/rendered content and APIs. iiuc, vercel runs on aws. Isn't the math fundamentally flawed on this kind of a business model if it isn't backed by owning the compute/network substrate first? Egress charges would be brutal. Targetting gross margins of 60-70% sounds like it would be hard. Would love to hear from VC/founders with their insights, esp for building dev tools businesses and "monetizing" frameworks which isn't something that's happened too often (or happened at all recently?)

duhi88 6y ago
I feels like Heroku 8 years ago. Cheap to get started, but I never recommended it for startups with a tight budget. You can get stuck with an architecture that becomes very expensive very quickly, and that scares me.
jeffshek 6y ago
It's a common startup strategy to have free plans that lock in initial customers and then raise prices later and/or remove the free plans. At that point, you're using customer growth as your primary metric to investors and thus raising money.
nfRfqX5n 6y ago
enterprise support

snicksnak 6y ago

judging by the url ("the next web") I expected something related to web3 or p2p and then was kinda disappointed to see yet another react framework. Side note: somehow my ISP (vodafone) has problems delivering me this domain, only was able to visit via opera with their vpn enabled.

elitan 6y ago

Congratulations. Well deserved to an awesome service and company!

b212 6y ago

Great! It might sound lame, but: - in early 2000s I couldn't live without JavaScript & animated gifs ;), - in late 2000s I couldn't live without jQuery, - in early 2010s I couldn't live without React, - in late 2010s I can't live without Next.js. It's an amazing platform and it's been an amazing experience. Everything "just works", and not having to fiddle with webpack or any other build tools is a blessing. I'm amazed by Next.js, the only thing what worries me a little is we have JS and on top of it sits React and on top of React we have Next.js... Anyway I think I've rediscovered React because of Next.js, I was tired of React at some point and they just saved me from a burnout I suppose. Keep up the good work! I think eventually FB might want to buy them out and merge React with Next.js. I don't want to sound embittered but I've had multiple "why wasn't this working like that by default in React?!" moments.

elitan 6y ago
Next.js is open source so if FB would want to merge React with Next.js I think they can do that anytime.

zaiste 6y ago

Congrats Guillermo and the whole team at Vercel! Initially I was a bit skeptical about Next.js, but nowadays I really like this all-in-one experience. There are still some rough edges, but it's understandable given the scope of this project. I'd love to see more focus on TypeScript, integration with something like esbuild or Snowpack or maybe even a Deno version (there's already Aleph.js). What may not be obvious at first glance is their dedication to solve those little, often difficult problems on the web. I like their next/image component. I was surprised to see AMP support. Their approach for blending frontend with backend is not only interesting, but practical. The future will be interesting for sure. Contrary to other commenters, I find Next.js docs pretty good. You can see there was a lot of effort put into writing their tutorial. Rough edges are mostly related to everything that supplements the framework, i.e. 3rd party libraries. I think eventually they will be expanding to cover these various scenarios. Also, I'm working on a 12-week video course about React.js / Next.js. When I noticed this announcement on HN, I figured it could be a good way to promote it. ;) It's not yet ready (early WIP). I plan to finalize details next week. So if you're looking for a React.js/Next.js jump-start, check it out at https://reactnextaz.com https://reactnextaz.com

olnluis 6y ago
Yeah, the attention to the little details, and developer comfort, is what makes Vercel great. I was a little disappointed, though, when they released the new Image component and it didn't seem to support AMP sites out of the box :(. I had to write my own wrapper function.

gazelleeatslion 6y ago

Congrats to these folks! Absolutely killing it and great product. Hopefully it doesn't get harder and harder to use Next.js on anything but Vercel.

aabbccsmith 6y ago

This is really well deserved — vercel is a brilliant company + an amazing product.

wdb 6y ago

Personally, I am quite interested in Remix (see: https://remix.run https://remix.run) which seems to be more flexible and does support not using Javascript in the final output but still leverage the convenience of React (personal opinion). Maybe Next.js would move a bit towards this approach too It's not free, though

BryanBeshore 6y ago

The one thing I dislike about Vercel is that you need to go all in or nothing with it. Say you have a micro-frontend strategy and would like part of your front-end in next.js; you can't. Overall I really am impressed with Vercel, though. It's been a fun project/company to work with.

leerob 6y ago
I have great news – you can do that! https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption https://nextjs.org/blog/incremental-adoption

byhemechi 6y ago

I've using Vercel since 1.0, when it was called ZEIT now. it's amazing, especially for next.js. It's great to see that a lot of other people agree.

haltingproblem 6y ago

I see a lot of excitement around the product but no idea of what service Vercel provides. Can someone explain (ELI5) or for python/django folks what Vercel does.

fajarsiddiqfs 6y ago

Congratulations! Future of JAMstack is awesome! ;)