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Vercel ends open-source sponsorship program giving projects 24hr notice
- jenny91 2y agoWe received an email yesterday saying the "100% discount is expiring on June 14". We're using them for deploy previews. Does anyone have recommendations on alternatives?
- floydnoel 2y agoNetlify or Cloudflare perhaps. I would think most platforms could handle that by now. Both Cloudflare and Netlify work for me in that scenario.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shakes 2y agoI'm on the DevRel team at Cloudflare. Definitely happy to help personally with anyone who needs help migrating. My email is in my profile. And we have an OSS sponsorship program: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-new-oss-sponsorships-program https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-new-oss-sponsorships-...
- solardev 2y agoI was really excited about Cloudflare Pages when it first launched, but back then it seemed a bit barebones compared to what Vercel was offering (in terms of the admin dashboard GUI, ease of managing previews, seeing logs and function runs, next/image optimizations integrations, ISR support, etc.). Like all of those things were possible on the Cloudflare system, but would've required manual setup across a few of your lower-level services, as opposed to a 1-click deploy on Vercel. (Which is understandable, since Next is their framework after all). Is it different (more integrated) these days? I'm a frequent customer of both Cloudflare and Vercel, but would love to see more fully-managed frontend services like Vercel.
- leerob 2y agoHey solardev, I'm on the team at Vercel. To clarify, the Vercel OSS program isn't going anywhere. Glad to hear you've had a good experience with Vercel. If an open source sponsorship is something you want to explore, please shoot me an email - lee at vercel.com.
- solardev 2y agoHey! I'm not one of the people looking for a sponsorship, but thank you. I often use both Vercel and Cloudflare (for different teams / projects).
- nahtnam 2y agoGoogle Cloud Run also has PR previews Fly.io has a GitHub action to make it pretty easy
- prophesi 2y agoI'm currently giving https://piku.github.io/ https://piku.github.io/ a go and it's working well, but this is just for hobby projects.
- rs999gti 2y agoIf it is important to your business for deployment staging, then why not just pay Vercel?
- NewJazz 2y agoWho said anything about a business?
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoI guess you missed all the negative reviews in this thread?
- shanehoban 2y agoSelf hosted coolify[0], very easy to set up IMO [0]: https://coolify.io/ https://coolify.io/
- erulabs 2y agoIf you’re comfortable with k8s there is no cheaper deal in town than Rackspace Spot.
- solardev 2y agoIf it's only for preview deployments, will the free plan suffice? Otherwise it's only $20/team member (person who can git push and deploy)/mo, which is still very reasonable for the features they offer. Otherwise you can set up your own Cloudflare Pages deploys instead, probably under their free plan, or $20/mo for their paid plan. It doesn't have the easy integrations that Vercel has, but you should be able to just set up a build webhook and have it publish a new deploy when you push.
- StarterPro 2y agoI've been using Koyeb pretty seamlessly
- NicoJuicy 2y agoCloudflare?
- bobfunk 2y agoNetlify CEO here. We've had a few open source plan since the early days and it's not going anywhere. https://www.netlify.com/legal/open-source-policy/ https://www.netlify.com/legal/open-source-policy/
- leerob 2y agoThe Vercel open source plan is also not going anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
- ocodo 2y ago... it's clearly in the toilet now, along with Vercel's reputation.
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoNot going anywhere as in the end of the road?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- teitoklien 2y agoI guess they’re facing severe financial strain
- emestifs 2y agohttps://medium.com/@alt.cap/time-to-get-fit-an-open-letter-from-altimeter-to-mark-zuckerberg-and-the-meta-board-of-392d94e80a18 https://medium.com/@alt.cap/time-to-get-fit-an-open-letter-f... /s. Or no /s? idk anymore. You decide. VC money hose is drying up I suppose
- refulgentis 2y agoIdk what you mean by the link, or the <s>, or what you don't know anymore, or what we can decide in this matter, or really what the matter at hand is, at all. Focusing on the article: Is there something I missed? Or did I get it right after reading 2x, and it really is just a random blog from 2 years ago advocating for bigcos to reduce headcount? If so, is that related in any way to Vercel cutting their sponsorship program for hosting for open source projects?
- emestifs 2y agoBasically you can read that above article as: Hey Mark, we've got a bunch of our money riding on your stock going up, so make your stock go up. I know in the past (2010-2022) we wanted you to grow like crazy and throw money around and grow some more, but like now with interest rates not 0 anymore and stuff, we need you to like start making money and you know, make the stock go up and up. K, thanks, bye. I found it funny because these are the same VC who spent a decade throwing money at anything with first Cloud, then ML/Deep Learning, then Blockchain, then threw money like no tomorrow during Covid, and now are like, yeah, we want you to not do any of that stuff anymore, just like actually make money now. The '/s' is an indicator of sarcasm in text, you'll see it in online comments from time to time. Hard to convey sarcasm online otherwise. And yes, as the other guy said, oh you're an AI company!? Here's a few million. We'll see how long that hype lasts for these "AI" startups.
- dstroot 2y ago
- mbonnet 2y agoAt some point, the piper will come for companies that rely so heavily on open-source software they do not themselves financially support or contribute to.
- d4mi3n 2y agoIt has. It continues to do so. Look no further than the plethora of issues surrounding supply chain security. Or the recent attempts at legislating OSS maintainer obligations.
- rs999gti 2y ago> supply chain security https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier "You are not buying from a supplier, you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code."
- ryukoposting 2y agoThe piper has come and gone several times. Solarwinds, left-pad, xz-utils, we can keep going here. We can holler all we want about corporations handle open source so irresponsibly, but at the end of the day they don't care unless there is a lasting impact on their bottom line.
- solardev 2y agoWell, Vercel at least maintains the open-source Next.js, which is a pretty important framework for a lot of us. And they provide a generous free and Teams plan for small teams and individual devs that just need to spin something up with minimal fuss. I'm biased (as a frontend dev who really appreciates what they've abstracted and simplified), but IMO they and Cloudflare have been the two companies really driving the Web forward as an app platform, where AWS and Google and Azure have stalled.
- jsnell 2y agoHow is the submitted article related to the headline? There's no claim of a "24hr notice" there, just that new sponsorships aren't being accepted.
- sicromoft 2y agoThe 24hr notice is mentioned by OP in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682720
- jsnell 2y agoThen I think they should submit the email (e.g. in a pastebin or Google doc or something). Not misrepresent the contents of this page. First, editorializing the submission titles is against HN policies. Second, it'd let us see the actual communication from Vercel rather than a paraphrase.
- mtmail 2y agoIt's fair to ask for proof. I checked Twitter and there's another user who posted a screenshot of their email. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40683874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40683874
- jsnell 2y agoThanks! And it's not so much about proof, it's about the details. For example the $300/month discount for a much longer transition period seems like pretty relevant context.
- altairprime 2y agoAgreed: this would have been better as a Tell HN: [same headline] with the text of the email. See my posting history for other examples.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoSee other comments.
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoI received the email for maglit.me yesterday. It's sad to see it ending as my project has proven itself to be useful to people and open source community. I'm thinking of applying to Netlify's sponsorship program or just hosting the website using Coolify on VPS, it'll cost money which would mean I'd have to ask the users for donations to make the project sustainable.
- tredre3 2y ago> Privacy Respecting Encrypted Link Shortener You seem to be doing server-side encryption? I guess "Encrypted" is technically true but since your server/vercel sees the clear URL and password it's not terribly useful. You also send all URLs to Google? It would be nice if you at least used the offline safebrowsing database instead!
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoThat safe browsing thing is more recent. I was receiving so many requests from the Italian government that I had to do something quick, otherwise they'd have shut the website down. As for the logs, vercel only has runtime logs. I do not store them. This is why it’s “privacy respecting” and not “privacy protecting” because maglit is not supposed to be the end all be all for privacy but It does have some nice security and privacy features for a FOSS project. The amount of scammers that used it before the safe browsing check was insane. People used to message me about how some links were being used to create fake links for their profiles and what not.
- mtmail 2y agoI found somebody on twitter posting their email https://x.com/ArnaudLigny/status/1801536871962489145 https://x.com/ArnaudLigny/status/1801536871962489145 "Hey there, Your team cecil is currently enrolled in the Vercel sponsorship program. Your 100% off discount is expiring on June 14. To give you time to handle this transition, we will automatically enroll your team into a $300/mo discount for the next 6 months, starting on June 14 and ending on December 14. Thank you for partnering together with us. Please reach out to sponsorships@vercel.com if you have any questions."
- kemitchell 2y agoThank you for this context. Giving a bunch of projects $300 a month in credits for six months is still far more than nearly any company does. I wonder if they had projects legitimately consuming more than $300 a month of their services.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoSo nice of Vercel. As if their cash cow wasn’t one of those ‘sponsored’ projects. Just wait to see what they will do to svelte
- hehdhdjehehegwv 2y agoAt least their extortion is polite?
- Folyd 2y agoVercel sponsored my project (https://github.com/huhu/rust-search-extension https://github.com/huhu/rust-search-extension) since 2020, and I also received their email yesterday. I sent a email try to ask the reason, and get no response yet.
- th3w3bmast3r 2y agoVercel did well to support to open source projects so far but I guess it's time for the work on their bottom line. This is why I am vary of free credits.
- leerob 2y agoThe program still exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoThey did not “did well”. They hurt open source much more than give back to the community. VC-backed ‘open source’ is a virus
- bdn_ 2y agoI have been sponsored by Vercel since early 2020. Vercel has primarily served as a CDN for my free and open-source font delivery system, using up to a couple hundred gigabytes of bandwidth per month. Luckily I've been using a custom domain for these deployments so migrating platforms should be easy! Does anyone have any recommendations for a CDN service that may be interested in sponsoring this type of project? I suppose it's possible to just use Cloudflare's free tier, but I'd like to avoid contributing to internet monopolies as much as possible.
- ericholscher 2y agoIf you're looking to host documentation, Read the Docs has been hosting docs for open source projects for 15 years now (I'm one of the co-founders). We put a small, ethical ad on your docs pages as tradeoff, and to make it sustainable, along with hosting credits from AWS (Thanks AWS!). We're happy to help host docs if that's what you're looking for: https://about.readthedocs.com/pricing/#/community https://about.readthedocs.com/pricing/#/community
- DaveTheSane 2y agoGet a machine from hetzner and use coolify or something similar and own your work. Here’s a great video from just 3 days ago: https://youtu.be/ZZ1lnw8D3Qo?si=ggzm9Znhz9HLwaSa https://youtu.be/ZZ1lnw8D3Qo?si=ggzm9Znhz9HLwaSa
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoThere are 3 problems with this approach that make Vercel / Netlify much better options: 1. People delude themselves into thinking that they have the magic unicorn project that will blow up to a million users in 1 day. 2. People are out of touch with how fast computers are these days, and don't realize that a single server can handle a huge amount of traffic. 3. People lack the skills to build out their own infra in a time efficient way. With all the tools and free knowledge we have today, it is trivial to set up a small network of small servers around the world for a small business. People lack the skills to do this, pay too much for cloud compute, then justify it to themselves that "it's cheaper than engineer time" - when in reality, if they were better engineers, it wouldn't take a lot of engineer time.
- torartc 2y agoThe first two don’t negate a vps option. 3. People greatly over estimate the amount of work it takes to setup a vps, especially with a OS deployment service like Coolify and the like. Takes less than an hour. You act like it’s a full time job when unless you’re app has completely blown up, it’s set once and forget.
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoYeah I totally agree with you. I tried to do a bait-and-switch with my comment above for comedic effect but I don't think it worked. I started it with a preface you'd expect from someone genuinely arguing against VPSs, then each of my points was actually about how the common arguments against VPSs are deluded/stupid.
- Laaas 2y agoI am grateful that they had an open source sponsorship program until now.
- ozuly 2y agoIn case it’s helpful to anyone who has to jump off vercel: I recently had to transition my company off of vercel for reasons unrelated to this (wanted to use cloud infra primitives that vercel does not provide, and wanted to leverage the large amount of AWS credits my company received) and found sst.dev [0] to be easy to migrate to and a joy to use in general. It leverages open-next to deploy next.js projects on AWS in a serverless way. I’ve been enjoying using it so much that for my next project I think I’ll skip vercel altogether and use sst from the start. [0] https://sst.dev/ https://sst.dev/
- recursivegirth 2y agoAWS Amplify Gen 2 supports Next.JS App Router finally. Not saying it's better or worse than SST/vercel, just saying it's also an option finally. https://docs.amplify.aws/nextjs/build-a-backend/server-side-rendering/nextjs-app-router-server-components/ https://docs.amplify.aws/nextjs/build-a-backend/server-side-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vikramkr 2y agoHeads up that vercel updated the copy on the page that's linked to by this post. It's not a blog post, it's a guide page, so obviously we'd expect it to change, but it's probably useful to track it in case comments here are responding to an older version. This is what it originally said: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614182520/https://vercel.com/guides/can-vercel-sponsor-my-open-source-project https://web.archive.org/web/20240614182520/https://vercel.co... Here's what it says at the time I'm posting this: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614223830/https://vercel.com/guides/can-vercel-sponsor-my-open-source-project https://web.archive.org/web/20240614223830/https://vercel.co... Seems like it's mainly an update to clarify things because of this thread. But honestly, they'd probably be better off just making a new post explaining what's going on. They might also want to clarify why some sponsorships seem to have coincidentally expired right around now (if that's what's happening), and what's up with this $300 credit thing.
- leerob 2y agoCorrect, I updated this page – the title of this HN post is misleading. Nowhere in the original guide did it mention anything related to the title, causing confusion in this thread. We are not ending the program, clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
- meiraleal 2y agoYour interjections in this thread is what is misleading. Let the people talk, you are on Vercel's payroll, the only one with a biased opinion here.
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoWith the amount of money vercel makes with react, nobody should see those ‘sponsorships’ as anything other than predatory market tactic