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Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'
- mhitza 8mo agoUnreadable without an instagram/threads account
- jmclnx 8mo agoWith noscript active, I was able to see most of it. >Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.
- plasticsoprano 8mo agono account needed -> https://www.threads.com/@qa_test_hq/post/DUkC_zjiGQh/media https://www.threads.com/@qa_test_hq/post/DUkC_zjiGQh/media
- guywithahat 8mo agoIt's also dumb because the original interaction happened on X https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post
- nailer 8mo agoDang maybe fix the link?
- rchaud 8mo agounfortunately it's also where the signal is distorted by the noise of a thousand blue check hangers-on who add nothing to the comment thread besides "great job, Mr CEO!", "this is a game changer", and other unquestioning platitudes.
- Lalabadie 8mo agoX links are also very limited today, and logged out visitors wouldn't see any reply to the tweet.
- Scoundreller 8mo agoChange x.com to xcancel.com, has never failed me
- rasz 8mo ago>Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are You could say the same thing about certain Island not to long ago, its where business and world leaders are!
- ryanjshaw 8mo agoHow does this work from an accounting perspective? They write off a bad debt, but the actual loss is likely multiple orders of magnitude less. Do they only get to write off up to the actuals?
- dolphinscorpion 8mo agoMarketing probably, unless thew CEO pulls out his credit card
- dbbk 8mo agoI don't really understand why he'd say he'd cover the costs personally... like, Vercel can just write it off, what's the significance of him paying for it?
- mschuster91 8mo agoAlternatively, bill the costs under the PR department as a marketing campaign.
- pdpi 8mo agoI suspect this sort of thing is some of the best marketing money can buy anyhow, so it's a bit of a no-brainer.
- 8mo ago
- gethly 8mo agoin other words, "we know our product is overpriced as hell, so i will pay for it to avoid further exposure of our pricing model".
- mschuster91 8mo agoIt's a screenshot of this Twitter thread [1] for those who can't view Threads on mobile because it forces you to sign in. [1] https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
- altern8 8mo agoIs that good PR? Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.
- detectivestory 8mo agoIts good PR. He had some pretty bad PR recently that caused a lot of people to boycott the service. I assume this is him trying to regain trust or something?
- ecshafer 8mo agoWhy wouldn't it be good to be associated with publicly exposing pedophiles, cannibals, murderers, and rapists? That seems to be a very good thing to be opposed to them.
- mdrzn 8mo ago1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in. 2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platform among developers. All my homies hate Vercel.
- dgrin91 8mo agoDo you really think a $30 hetzner host can sustain that level of traffic performantly? Don't get me wrong, I love hetzner, but I would be very surprised if the numbers work out there.
- blibble 8mo agoyes and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns serving static content scales horizontally perfectly
- mdrzn 8mo agoFor sure, even cheaper if you cache effectively.
- Nextgrid 8mo agoIsn’t it just serving static content and the content fitting in RAM? If so your laptop can serve it just fine even.
- iOSThrowAway 8mo agoA laptop would have a hard time serve thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day.
- lanyard-textile 8mo agoIt all depends of course, but generally no, a laptop could handle that just fine.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- prodigycorp 8mo agoWhat would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress. edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
- doublesocket 8mo agoRailway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
- js3642 8mo agoWhile I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failures-e3c635ac https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
- dban 8mo agoSMTP is gated behind the $20/mo Pro plan to reduce spam on the internet. It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan
- throwaway290 8mo agothat's rich, from Railway employee. your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan. but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right? don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af
- aaviator42 8mo agoI'm not the first to point this out but the website in question, which is mostly static, could easily be hosted on a VPS for at most a couple hundred dollars a month.
- tbeseda 8mo agoDirectly to CDN. Put it in a CloudFront distribution and it would be a fraction of a fraction of that Vercel bill. Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.
- igneo676 8mo agoRather than linking to a threads post that is a screenshot of the x.com post with little to no commentary, we should be linking to the original x.com post https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
- bstsb 8mo agoor to a nitter instance, where you can actually read responses without signing in: https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
- crote 8mo agoConsidering that Twitter doesn't show the original post for non-logged-in users, the screenshot on Threads actually provides a better reading experience for most people!
- theultdev 8mo agoYou're missing a large part of the conversation and context if you don't at least link to the source.
- opello 8mo agoIt seems like sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and I can only imagine popularity is somehow the reason.
- guywithahat 8mo agoOnly if you already have a threads account. On mobile it makes you sign in
- theultdev 8mo agoAgreed, was slow to load and I just had to find the source post on X to view the real conversation "thread". This is the first Threads link I've ever seen here. Is that what Threads mainly is, reposting X screenshots and starting a sidechain conversation?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- selimonder 8mo agoBoo is the only think i can imagine when I hear about Vercel
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoSource: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 (https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622)
- aurareturn 8mo ago$46k for 470m page views. That seems extremely expensive. What the heck? Is he using Vercel Functions as well? I think this is where some SPA + a few instances of a Node.js server + Redis would be much cheaper. I'd say you can probably serve this much on $1k/month? It's simple content. It's not like it needs to do complex business logic in the backend.
- an0malous 8mo agoIsn't Jmail a static site? How could the bill be $47k?
- ExpertAdvisor01 8mo agoBandwith costs
- dbbk 8mo agoIt would be $0 if they spent 10 minutes just throwing Cloudflare CDN in front. They don't even need to move off Vercel.
- bgirard 8mo agoThat's a good question. As someone bootstraping a few projects on Vercel this post has me looking over at the pricing sheet more closely.
- INTPenis 8mo agoThere is still a helluva lot of data to transfer to the client, I'm sure it's being stored somewhere. And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.
- Nextgrid 8mo agoTech bros and VCs need to eat, that's how.
- TheDong 8mo agoThere's a searchbar, and the amount of content you search through is far more than you could do with clientside search. Definitely not just static content.
- direwolf20 8mo agoIt's Vercel, it's their business model. They have all the minnows eating for free, and then once you pass a threshold, you're a whale with a whale–sized bill.
- openclawagent13 8mo agoWhat would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $150 a month? Vercel's pricing is so convoluted that you can't even compare usage. With render/railway you can at least predict that your biggest cost is going to be high.
- iamleppert 8mo agoInsane to me a bill that large for what is effectively hosting static content. He could dump the entire thing on S3 and even with cloudfront it would be fraction of that.
- hellogspot 8mo agoIt's common to hear rumors about SF CEOs and their NDAs with young (but legal) ladies. I hope there's no irony here, g.
- heipei 8mo agoThe post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535. Did I get something wrong?
- lexh 8mo agoIsn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.
- heipei 8mo agoYes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.
- direwolf20 8mo agoSome people don't realize how big machines get. A single ordinary server can have a 4x100Gbps connection and 256 physical CPU cores.
- __jonas 8mo agoGenuine question: How is that a value proposition when Cloudflare offers a CDN for free with unlimited bandwidth, that you could just put in front of the sweaty VM in Helsinki? Not trying to be obtuse, I really don't get how other providers can compete with that, I can't imagine Vercel's CDN is so significantly superior to make it worth it.
- tracker1 8mo agoFor that matter, the entire site could be in a Cloudflare worker with all the content in R2 (no egress fees, just storage). Likely to barely exceed the $5 baseline price for a paid account. (not sure on the storage costs, but likely well under $100/mo)
- fusslo 8mo agoI know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team? Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages. It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down. jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files. I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.
- moralestapia 8mo agoThis was there (way) before the last batch of files was released. But your point stands, the amount of work they've put into this is remarkable.
- sandworm101 8mo agoPublic files needing to be distributed to a huge population of interested persons? Sounds like the perfect situation for an oldschool torrent. That's how large data leaks were handled back in my day. 450TB is peanuts for perhaps ten thousand peers on fast residential connections.
- opengrass 8mo agoOr dump the EML for everyone to import into their own clients.
- dylan604 8mo agoThat feels gross. I'd hate to have the risk of something that was meant to be redacted and not and now you have that on your own client.
- sgammon 8mo agoWould have been much cheaper in the first case on Cloudflare
- villgax 8mo agoGarbage engineering begets garbage bills
- Anonyneko 8mo agoWhy is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
- vimda 8mo agoThis is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions
- direwolf20 8mo agothis is convenience for tech folks and the price isn't a few bucks a month but 1000x. It's like if Dropbox was an rsync server (no app) and it cost $10,000 a month for 1TB of space. Think it would still take off?
- laughingcurve 8mo agoIt’s just that simple! https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
- unleaded 8mo agoit literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
- unleaded 8mo agoalso developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
- Vicinity9635 8mo ago[dead]
- swyx 8mo agothe image makes it easier to see the top post and response together. also i guess the threads comments add extra context
- acejam 8mo ago450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000 450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
- danpalmer 8mo ago450m page views in 1 month is only 173 requests per second. You can do that on a much cheaper box.
- acejam 8mo agoSure, you are only proving my point even further. I just happen to have a personal policy of "no boxes in prod under 16 cores". :)
- swyx 8mo agowhy?
- lucideer 8mo agoYou're assuming an extremely consistent traffic rate, with zero spikes....
- danpalmer 8mo agoSure, but my point is that 450m requests is just not a lot. Humans are bad at big numbers, and this number sounds like a scary amount of traffic, my point is that it is a very boring amount of traffic even on modest hardware. I personally wouldn't stick it on a single VPS because we can do way better than that in terms of reliability, but the point stands that you don't need very much in terms of resources to serve this.
- kstrauser 8mo agoHaving someone on-call 24/7 to keep that $245 box running: $400K.
- asim 8mo ago[flagged]
- TomeveilSeeker 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dang 8mo agoRecent and related: Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600 - Dec 2025 (363 comments)
- ftchd 8mo agocreator of Rev (Vercel Mobile) here you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets) https://github.com/revcel/revcel https://github.com/revcel/revcel
- janlucien 8mo ago[dead]
- mvdtnz 8mo agoThis is an absolutely ludicrous bill for that number of page views. Even if it was built in the dumbest way possible (I'm not saying it was) this would be ridiculous. This is not as good a look for Vercel as they think it is. I would be embarrassed to shine more light on this pricing if I was the CEO.