Trying to Cut the Cost of Hosting Next.js on Vercel

The $20 USD/mo problem

The issue is that right now I have a pre-revenue application built with Next.js hosted on Vercel for $20 USD per month, which comes to $28 CAD per month.

That works out to $336/year for an application with no revenue. The good news is that this bill already includes the cost of my Supabase database.

That said, if I build several applications over the course of a year, the cost of launching apps can climb fairly quickly.

So I tried 2 alternatives: Cloudflare and Render.

Trying Cloudflare

I tried the approach from Deploying Next.js on Cloudflare | The Vercel Better Alternative?, but since I use "next": "^16.2.6" it is not possible to run my app with OpenNext as of today.

Trying Render

Next, I tried Render. It uses a cold-start approach, which adds 50 seconds of waiting when a new visitor opens the application.

Trying to acquire users with a 50-second delay on every visit is really not a smart move.

The VPS option, like DigitalOcean or OVHcloud

DigitalOcean start at 4usd$/m OVH cloud start at 4cad$/m

Need to learn

ssn tunnel
linux distro
package manager (apt, yum), vim,
caddy or nginx
setup a domain
(app rebuilder )systemd - pm2 - forver
automatethe deploy new updates, script
docker & docker compose with github action
Adding a load balancer (caddy, nginx)
Code as a service Terraform
k8s

Do this before you deploy to Vercel

There are far too many steps — I would rather keep hosting minimal.

I am staying on Vercel, but you have to configure as much as possible to avoid bills that blow up.

How to Avoid Big Serverless Bills

As a second option, I am looking at Railway.

What I learned

Vercel, the author of Next.js, has genuinely put in the effort to make deploying Next.js on Vercel easy — and that even makes migrating a Next.js app to another host very difficult.

Simplicity has a price:

Vercel — $20 USD/mo, simple and stable, plus a whole set of integrations.
Cloudflare — even with the OpenNext project, they struggle to support the latest versions.
Render — the cold start slows down adoption.

If your time is worth more than $20/month right now, stay on Vercel and ship.