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The page load performance of a site on Vercel's free and paid tier should be the same. Both would be using Vercel's Edge Network and possible a Vercel Function if dynamically rendered. As mentioned in the post, we're working to improve loading performance in general with the Next.js App Router.

But the stuff is static. Just that RSC files are oddly slow which can prevent a page transition on a fast click.

And there isn’t a way to signify loading as those events on the router are gone.

lots of free tiers have slow start up times when an app has been idle

(eg: heroku and render)

Not 100% sure if this is what is causing that on Vercel, but seems fair to me for free tiers?

People definitely get what they pay for. Heroku was and still is notoriously slow, charging a massive premium for convenience. I'm obviously biased because I built a CD service for AWS, but I strongly believe that when a hosting service doesn't advertise what hardware resources you are actually getting, it's a trap.

It's backed by lambda that has cold start. Don't think that part has to do with free tiers.

App router itself is slow (slower than page router).