I used to host the web app (SQLAI.ai) on Vercel and still do, but I moved the “app” portion to Cloudflare given the much broader feature set and significantly lower price. The app is deployed on a subdomain and runs completely separately. I initially wanted to move the landing pages to Cloudflare and port them to Astro, but it’s too much work moving all the legacy pages for too little value. Naturally, I wanted to downgrade from Vercel Pro to Hobby, since I didn’t think I needed any Pro features and $20 is expensive. For comparison, I pay $5 for Cloudflare’s Paid Worker and another $5 for database hosting on Railway. Vercel charges four times that.

Here’s the issue: even for a relatively small and largely static site, I have to stay on the Pro plan because SQLAI.ai is using more than the 1 million Edge Requests included per month. In the dashboard, you can’t see exactly what those Edge Requests are used for–only per-day usage. Searching around, I found that everything counts as an Edge Request:

Requests to regions are not only for Functions using the edge runtime. Edge Requests are for all requests made to your site, including static assets and functions.

Source: Vercel documentation.

So each of those 30 logos of supported databases the web app has on the frontpage make up a Edge Request. The front page makes around 50 requests–mainly to static assets, but it is also prefetching pages (the default for Next.js’s <Link /> component). To stay on the Hobby plan, I’d need fewer than ~20,000 visits per month (1,000,000/50).

And it’s not like I haven’t tried to limit usage to avoid Vercel Pro. I originally managed to stay on the free tier by offloading most static content to Cloudflare R2, since Vercel limits monthly data transfer to 100 GB (you can hit that quickly with an embedded video or a couple of large images).

Vercel doesn’t really have a free tier (ironically branded “Free Forever”) that lets bootstrappers, hobbyists, or students deploy small projects for free before proportional charging kicks in. Vercel is first and foremost a business. The pricing is steep, and the limits seem optimized to move customers from the free tier to paying $20/month, even at small amounts of traffic. Expect to pay at least $20 per month for a small web app.