Vercel earned its $20/month tier. It earned the developer love. It did not earn the $4,000/month bills enterprise customers pay for what is, fundamentally, hosting + a CDN.
We help clients migrate off Vercel regularly. Here's when to do it, and where to go.
- $0-200/month spend: Hobby and Pro tiers are excellent. Don't switch.
- Marketing site or low-traffic SaaS: Vercel's DX is worth the price.
- Heavy use of Next.js-specific features: ISR, on-demand revalidation, image optimization - Vercel is the reference impl.
- Bandwidth bill over $500/month: Vercel charges $40/100GB after your tier limit. Cloudflare R2 + Pages is essentially free at the same volume.
- Edge function execution over 10M/month: $2/million on Vercel. Cloudflare Workers: $0.50/million. Math is obvious.
- Build minutes consistently maxed: Vercel charges $40/100 build minutes after your tier. Self-hosted GitHub Actions: free.
- You're hitting concurrent build limits: Indicates you've outgrown Vercel's pricing model.
The 3 alternatives we recommend
- 1
Cloudflare Pages + Workers (most common pick)
Free tier handles 10M requests/month. $5/month gives you 10M Workers requests + unlimited bandwidth. Zero egress charges. Better DX than Vercel for static + edge. Worse for ISR-heavy Next.js apps.
- 2
Railway (best DX for full-stack)
If you need Node + Postgres + Redis + a worker queue all in one bill, Railway is unbeatable. Usage-based pricing. $5 minimum. Scales to $500/month for serious apps. Heroku replacement done right.
- 3
AWS (cheapest at scale, worst DX)
Above $5K/month, AWS will save you 40-60%. Lambda + S3 + CloudFront + RDS with proper IaC. Requires a real DevOps engineer. We migrate clients here at $10K+ MRR if they have the engineering capacity.
Migration playbook
Migrate non-critical routes first
Move marketing pages and assets to Cloudflare. Keep the app on Vercel. Compare metrics for 2 weeks.
Set up dual deployment
Build and deploy to both Vercel and the new host in parallel. Switch DNS only when the new host is verified for a week.
Test ISR + image optimization carefully
These are Vercel's hardest features to replicate. Cloudflare Image Resizing + on-demand revalidation hooks work but require setup.
"Vercel earned its $20/mo tier. It did not earn the $4,000/mo bills enterprise customers pay for hosting + a CDN."
Vercel vs the alternatives at scale
| Provider | 100GB egress | 10M edge calls | DX rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Pro | $40 | $20 | Excellent |
| Cloudflare Pages | Free | $5 | Very good |
| Railway | $10 | Included | Excellent |
| AWS (Lambda + S3 + CloudFront) | $8 | $2 | Painful without DevOps |
Migration playbook (proven across 8 clients)
Migrate non-critical routes first
Move marketing pages and assets to Cloudflare. Keep the app on Vercel. Compare metrics for 2 weeks.
Run dual deployment
Build and deploy to both hosts in parallel. Switch DNS only when the new host is verified for a week.
Test ISR + image optimization carefully
These are Vercel's hardest features to replicate. Cloudflare Image Resizing + on-demand revalidation hooks work but require setup.
Keep a rollback DNS plan
TTL set to 60s, switch back in 1 minute if anything breaks. We've done this 8x without downtime.
We migrate Vercel apps without downtime.
Average client savings after migration: 60-80%. Migration takes 1-2 weeks.
When to leave Vercel
- Under $500/mo bill - stay on Vercel, the DX is worth it.
- Bandwidth bill over $500/mo - migrate to Cloudflare.
- Need full-stack (Node + Postgres + Redis) - try Railway.
- Above $5K/mo and have DevOps - move to AWS for 40-60% savings.
- Always plan migration with dual deploy + DNS rollback.
Vercel is great. Until it isn't.
If your bill is under $500/month, stay. The DX is worth it. Above $1K/month, do the math. Migrating to Cloudflare or Railway is a 1-2 week project that pays for itself in 60 days.
We've migrated 8 clients in 2026 and saved them a combined $200K+. Nobody has migrated back.
The IRPR engineering team ships production software for 50+ countries. Idea → Roadmap → Product → Release. 200+ products live.
About IRPR