What is Vercel?

Vercel is a platform for deploying and hosting web applications. When developers build a web app, they first build everything on their computer. But if they want it available on the internet for everyone to use, they need to deploy it to a platform like Vercel. It was created by the team that built the React framework Next.js, and it’s optimized for front-end and full-stack JavaScript applications.

The main appeal is that deployment is incredibly simple. You connect your GitHub repository, and Vercel automatically deploys your app whenever you push code. Every pull request gets its own preview URL so you can test changes before merging. And it handles all the infrastructure details like CDN distribution, serverless functions, and scaling automatically.

Vercel uses edge computing, which means your application runs on servers distributed around the world, close to your users. This makes your site load faster no matter where someone is accessing it from. Static files get served from a CDN, and dynamic content runs as serverless functions that scale automatically.

The platform has a generous free tier that includes 100 GB bandwidth, 6,000 build minutes, and 100 GB-hours of serverless execution per month. This makes it popular for personal projects, portfolios, and small applications. Larger applications typically need paid plans.

In 2025, Vercel has been positioning itself as an “AI Cloud” platform, adding AI-focused development tools and features. They process over 30 billion requests weekly and have grown significantly as front-end frameworks have become more popular.

I haven’t actually used Vercel yet. I’ve used Heroku and cloud platforms like GCP and AWS for deployments. But next time I build a Next.js app, I can’t wait to try it. The preview deployments and automatic scaling sound like they’d make the development workflow much smoother.