Vercel ends open-source sponsorship program giving projects 24hr notice
vercel.com
vercel.com
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."
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.
Disgusting behavior.
We haven’t been accepting new sponsorships while we update the existing program, but it’s still running and will accept sponsorships again, soon.
This is disgusting extortioniate behavior that would make me reconsider doing business with Vercel.
It would have been far better to have communicated the answers to these questions up front.
I appreciate Vercels support for open source projects, past and future, and I certainly understand that Vercels support needs to and will evolve overtime. But for Vercels own benefit as well as the benefit of the projects you are supporting, it is important to make these announcements with clarity- and to provide plenty of notice.
We're using them for deploy previews. Does anyone have recommendations on alternatives?
And we have an OSS sponsorship program: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-new-oss-sponsorships-...
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.
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.
Fly.io has a GitHub action to make it pretty easy
[0]: https://coolify.io/
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.
We've had a few open source plan since the early days and it's not going anywhere.
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://docs.amplify.aws/nextjs/build-a-backend/server-side-...
This is what it originally said: 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.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.
We are not ending the program, clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684147
Your bias is showing in your comment history.
Btw your "clarification" is BS. "Our program goes nowhere but we cancelled most sponsorships and don't plan to renew or accept any projects for now".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
First, editorializing the submission titles is against HN policies. Second, it'd let us see the actual communication from Vercel rather than a paraphrase.
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.
This is why I am vary of free credits.
VC money hose is drying up I suppose
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?
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.
This to shall pass.
How tf? They're the most overpriced product I pay for (and I like it, no complains).
While I think them ending support from a day to another is terrible (should've given much more time to address it) at the end of the day they have put lots of money in open source ecosystem and hired plenty of devs to work on their own projects (not even Vercel's).
Why should they get bashed at least some? Because, if we’re treating this strictly as marketing, the deal they proposed to OSS maintainers was, basically: you spend the effort of building things on top of our non-second-sourceable offering; we give you free use of said offering; you give us marketing in the form of homepage badges, procurement suggestions at your workplace, etc. No money changed hands and no contractual obligations were accepted by the provider, but this is still very much a deal, and the porting at the outset is effectively an advance.
So the harder it is to move away from the offering—the larger the advance—the more bashing is deserved. And Vercel is pretty hard to move away, from what I understand, certainly more so than, say, Travis CI.
(Also, that public press release is pretty much a lie in how it attempts to leave a very misleading impression using technically true statements, and I’m never not going to be bashing people or companies for lying or bullshitting. Yes, I know it’s very common and in many cases effectively a legal necessity, I’m still not going to stop.)
Should the other good things they’ve done mean they’re exempted from the bad press? Ideally, no: the only way to have an adequate picture of a thing is to have a fair sample of its good and bad things. Biasing the sample by hand rarely makes things better unless done with a careful and systematic approach, which the cat herd that is the press is not really capable of collectively. Practically, still no, I think: there are enough of those kinds of biases that I prefer to avoid piling up more as a general principle.
Finally, would it be fair to go from “Vercel did bad thing” to “Vercel bad”, in view of those other good things? No, I think, but I wasn’t suggesting that. I did adjust my idea of their trustworthiness down fairly heavily, though. (It is possible to do good, even well-intentioned things and at the same time not operate your service in a reliable or trustworthy way.)
They say 2M in Vercel credits. How much is that in actual money?
The only reasonable way to track this is to understand how much each customer costs (in servers, hardware, etc) and internally attribute those costs to marketing instead of revenue.
Is next js good? Sure. But so was jquery back in the day and they didn't need the 250 million in cash to burn through.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/06/vercel-serverless-scale-e...
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.
Ps. They aren't a monopoly. There are plenty of cloud services competing.
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