After several years under 100 dollars a month on Vercel, one month jumped to over 800 for a front-end-only Next.js app, and support took nearly two weeks to give a generic answer; moved to Cloudflare Workers.
75signal
198reviewsi
A score out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews, so a handful of glowing reviews can’t beat a product many people like.
51% Positive11%38% Negative
Customers praise how easy it is to deploy, especially Next.js, and many pay little for small or moderate sites.
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Customer reviews (198)
Add your reviewShowing 40 reviews mentioning surprise bill Show all
A Vercel project with 18-20k daily visitors produced a bill of about 1,000-1,200 dollars a month, mostly Fast Data Transfer at 80-160 GB a day, with a 2.5 MB first load bundle.
After traffic hit limits on an open-source app the user upgraded to the 20 dollar plan and still got a surprise 100 dollar add-on bill at month end, then moved to their own VPS.
A colleague deploying 30-plus times a day racked up a 250 dollar Vercel bill for one project in build time alone, so they are moving to a VPS for about 70 dollars a month across several projects.
Their company pays over 100,000 dollars a year to Vercel, mostly ISR costs on a frequently changing catalogue site, and feels held hostage because migrating off is costly.
Vercel bill crept up to 300-plus dollars with unchanged API routes and the logs needed another paid subscription to inspect; they migrated off, which was painful but worth it.
Free-tier Vercel limits were blown by GPTBot making 164,000 requests a day to an open-source docs site, forcing an upgrade to Pro, though the free tier had been enough before.
A nonprofit with 14 million unique monthly visitors was facing 23,000 dollar monthly Vercel bills and found Vercel support and sales worthless, so moved to VPS servers that drop for seconds at times.
Vercel image transformation costs jumped from about 15 dollars to 70 in one month with only a slight traffic rise, now most of the bill, so they are migrating away.
An app with 30-50k monthly traffic but 600,000 daily bot hits cost 15 dollars on a VPS and 300 a month on Vercel, with about 10 dollars daily; quit after a few days.
Self-hosts because Vercel at 20 dollars per user would cost about 140 a month for a team of seven, which they call borderline predatory.
Got a 237 dollar Vercel Pro bill in six days for 25,000 visitors, driven by edge requests, data transfer and image transformations, projecting to about 1,200 a month.
Got robbed on a Vercel bill when DDoS requests came through and Vercel did not bother refunding, so switched to DigitalOcean.
A side project with barely any real traffic got a 949 dollar Vercel bill after upgrading to Pro when a crawler hit dynamic routes; support offered only 25 percent off.
Vercel protection was not good enough during an attack: more than a million edge requests in one hour, until Cloudflare rate limiting and rules in front fixed it.
Paid about 35 dollars per environment on AWS, which translated to 800 dollars in a single month on Vercel; calls Vercel expensive but a valid launchpad for operational overhead.
After nearly two years on Vercel with a site of many pages, costs hit about 10 dollars a day and they moved to a dedicated VPS at 29 a month.
Got a Vercel bill with over 120 dollars of on-demand usage so far in the cycle.
A ByteDance crawler ran up a roughly 20,000 dollar Vercel bill and Vercel refused to reduce it.
Vercel bill reached 1,933.93 dollars in one month, up from 30 the month before, after Meta crawler traffic triggered millions of serverless function invocations.
Got an unexpected 1,141.89 dollar Vercel bill, mostly Fast Data Transfer (1,031) and Edge Requests (87), for a Next.js site with static pages and an ISR blog.
At a big tech company experimenting with Next.js, a 300,000 dollar Vercel bill landed in their inbox a few years ago.
Was charged about 6,000 dollars on a 20 dollar Vercel plan after a few million network requests with some large files, and says Vercel fights refunds; now pays a fixed 24 dollars on DigitalOcean.
Hit heavy egress charges and abusive traffic on Vercel with images and dynamic content, only fixed by caching and putting Cloudflare in front.
Their multilingual site with a couple hundred sitemaps that cannot be statically generated is billed around 700 dollars a month by Vercel.
Says Vercel charges for every function call, duration, feature and surge in traffic, more than anywhere else, and that it is not a serious platform for serious businesses.
A first-time builder says Vercel cost an astronomical amount for just the homepage and moved off it.
Their work Vercel Pro plan produced a last bill of around 10,000 dollars, so they are looking for alternatives.
They ran four side projects on Vercel with modest traffic and were hit with a 380 dollar invoice, which they found shocking for projects that earn nothing.
An app that has basically not changed started seeing Vercel costs creep up each month from bot and AI traffic plus ISR.
Common questions about Vercel
What do customers say about Vercel?
Customers praise how easy it is to deploy, especially Next.js, and many pay little for small or moderate sites. The main complaint is unexpected bills from traffic spikes, bots, image optimisation or edge requests, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars, with mixed results getting them reduced. Per-seat costs also sting small teams.
Is Vercel worth it?
Of the 138 reviews with a clear verdict, 51% are positive, 11% mixed and 38% negative. The praise mentioned most is easy to use. The most common complaint is surprise bill.
What do people like about Vercel?
The praise reviewers mention most: easy to use (40 reviews), great value (31 reviews) and good free plan (13 reviews). For example: Their Next.js site has been painless on Vercel, usually just a git push, and the convenience keeps them there.
What are the most common complaints about Vercel?
The complaints reviewers mention most: surprise bill (39 reviews), hidden fees (14 reviews) and upsells (8 reviews). For example: Their work Vercel Pro plan produced a last bill of around 10,000 dollars, so they are looking for alternatives.
What does the signal score of 75 mean?
It's how well reviewed Vercel is, out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews: a service needs plenty of them, compared with the most-reviewed services here, to reach the high 80s and 90s. It's worked out from reviews only, needs at least 5 of them, and updates as new ones come in.
What are the specs of Vercel?
Category: Static & frontend hosting. Free plan: Yes.
Where do these Vercel reviews come from?
197 are quotes from Reddit, each linked to the original. 1 was written by customers here. Customer reviews are checked for spam before they appear. Every review, written here or quoted, is read as positive, mixed or negative.