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It seems like they need a much better solution somewhere in the mid-tier--Vercel is great to get started on projects, but if you basically need to go from small project to 5 figure bill without much in between, it hardly seems to make sense to use for a project that is going to scale.
Higher usage can be purchased separately from Enterprise, not as cheap as the initial plan, but far from 5-figures: https://vercel.com/docs/limits/overview#additional-resources
So really we're mostly talking about SLAs. I think "we absolutely need an SLA" seems a decent way to differentiate between small businesses and enterprise businesses.
The other dilemma for them seems to be in capturing true enterprise customers...if you have those resources, you might just decide to build out your own dev ops/infra team instead of paying big markups on AWS/Cloudflare bills.
I think your second point is debatable. We used to spend something like $50-100k a year on Heroku which is technically way overpriced, but hiring even a single devops person to move us to AWS would have been much more expensive and introduced all sorts of risk. I think a medium sized company is fine paying $100-300k to something like Heroku as long as the offerings are fitting the architectural needs. And Heroku is AWS so you can always use some AWS services alongside your Heroku stuff.
I've hosted many sites on Vercel and never noticed issues or significant downtime on any of their plans, Enterprise or Pro.
It seems to me that their other plans are basically loss leaders for their Enterprise offerings, but if you're a solo dev or small biz prototyping something, there is no need to go enterprise yet.
Let me know if you have any questions.
But for large companies making millions or billions it’s a convenience that saves engineering costs.
If you're big enough to need the Enterprise plan, sure, you could build your own, but apparently enough of their customers don't want to.
FWIW, because of Vercel, I would personally never launch another website on a lower level cloud host (like EC2/S3) again. It's just not worth the time and setup. The higher level of abstraction that Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, etc provide is very nice for DX and time savings.
Never had any issues with upgrades/downtime for over a year now - it's pretty fire and forget.
Native vercel serverless functions running in Vercel are also highly restricted (10 seconds in hobby, and no more than 60 seconds in Pro) which I also don't have to worry about.
That seems like a pretty big pain, though, compared to a single click on Vercel and you get that same functionality for free. What's the advantage of doing it yourself? Each of those steps is quite a lot of work (few hours the first time? sure you can automate it for reuse later, but it still sounds much more of a hassle than the nice Vercel GUI). And what happens when part of the stack needs updates? (The VPS, or DOcker, or a Github action or one of its dependencies, or Nginx, or the firewall, or the rules...)
> Native vercel serverless functions running in Vercel are also highly restricted (10 seconds in hobby, and no more than 60 seconds in Pro) which I also don't have to worry about.
That's a looooong time for a serverless func to run. Curious, what do you use them for?
The poster asked about the enterprise tier.
Do you put a team of a few devs / million plus dollars per year or 50k.
