Vercel

Operator's take

If you've had an AI agent or a developer build you something — a marketing site, a client portal, a small internal app — the question nobody answers cleanly is where the thing actually lives. Vercel is the most common answer, and for good reason: you connect a Git repository, and from then on every commit deploys itself. There is no server to rent, patch, or wake up at 2am. You get a global CDN, HTTPS, and a URL, in about the time it takes to read this paragraph.

The feature that changes how you work isn't the deploying, though — it's the preview. Every branch and pull request gets its own live URL. That means the conversation with whoever is building for you stops being "can you send me a screenshot" and becomes "here's a link, click around." For an operator reviewing work they didn't write, that's the difference between approving something you understood and approving something you squinted at. This site runs on it, alongside Neon for the database.

The catch is the bill, and it's the same catch Railway and Supabase have. Pro is $20 per user per month, which sounds like the whole story and isn't — data transfer, function invocations, edge requests, and image optimization all meter separately on top. A quiet marketing site will sit inside the included allowance forever. A post that unexpectedly does numbers, or a badly-written function called on every page load, produces a bill you didn't plan. Set the spend controls on day one rather than after the first surprise.

What it's good at

• Git-push deployment with zero pipeline config — connect GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket and every commit builds and ships; CI/CD without you assembling one.
• A live preview URL for every branch and pull request — the single most useful feature for a non-technical operator reviewing work, because you click the thing instead of imagining it.
• Global CDN, DDoS mitigation, and firewall basics on every plan, including free — the security floor is not an upsell.
• A genuinely usable free tier — Hobby is free forever with 100GB data transfer, 1M function invocations, and 5K image transformations monthly; enough to run a real personal or prototype site indefinitely, not a countdown trial.
• Unlimited viewer seats on Pro — you pay $20/month per developer, but clients and stakeholders who only need to look cost nothing.
• A self-serve HIPAA path — a $350/month add-on on Pro, purchasable from Settings without a sales call, with a published list of which Vercel products the BAA covers. Most infrastructure vendors gate this behind Enterprise.

What it's not

• Not no-code — there is no drag-and-drop builder here. Vercel hosts an app someone (or some agent) wrote; if you want to build without code, that's Webflow, Framer, Softr, or Bubble, and then Vercel isn't in your stack at all.
• Not a fixed monthly line item — the $20/user base is metered on top, so cost tracks traffic and compute rather than sitting still. Operators who need a predictable number to put in a client budget should either set hard spend caps or price a flat-rate host instead.
• Not the cheapest home for a heavy backend — Vercel's shape is frontend plus serverless functions. Long-running jobs, queues, and always-on workers are a poor fit and get expensive; Railway or Fly.io suit that better.
• Not covered by the BAA everywhere by default — the HIPAA add-on covers a specific published product list, and Secure Compute, the tier recommended for the most sensitive healthcare workloads, is Enterprise-only. Read the in-scope list before assuming a feature is included.