Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.
edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that?
I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol.
If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.
It's like if Dropbox was an rsync server (no app) and it cost $10,000 a month for 1TB of space. Think it would still take off?
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
Did I get something wrong?
Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.
Not trying to be obtuse, I really don't get how other providers can compete with that, I can't imagine Vercel's CDN is so significantly superior to make it worth it.
Definitely not just static content.
And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.
Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post
You could say the same thing about certain Island not to long ago, its where business and world leaders are!
>Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files
and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.
you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets)
Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.
It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.
jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.
I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.
But your point stands, the amount of work they've put into this is remarkable.
(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)
So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)
You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).
So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.
Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.
To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.
Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.
https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
This is the first Threads link I've ever seen here. Is that what Threads mainly is, reposting X screenshots and starting a sidechain conversation?
Use nitter or xcancel
Vercel's pricing is so convoluted that you can't even compare usage. With render/railway you can at least predict that your biggest cost is going to be high.
Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.
2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platform among developers. All my homies hate Vercel.
Have seen it happen to smaller projects and even pointed it out when Vercel took static sites down.
So they have always had a bad rep in my opinion.
You could also get a VPS from Digital Ocean or Hertzner, run open-source PaaS like Coolify, Dokploy, Caprover, etc.
Digital Ocean has app platform that’s lets you host these applications but more experience than VPS
Sealos has a $7 and $25 plan and work with Next.js
Just a few options. If you’re looking to leave Next.js completely, check out Tanstack Start. It’s by the creator of React-Query (defacto way to handle fetching data in Next.js). Still some rough edges but I think it could overtake Next.js once a bit more mature.
They will sell you a 10Gbps uplink however, with (very reasonably priced) metered bandwidth.
and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns
serving static content scales horizontally perfectly
Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?
$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.
That seems extremely expensive. What the heck?
Is he using Vercel Functions as well?
I think this is where some SPA + a few instances of a Node.js server + Redis would be much cheaper.
I'd say you can probably serve this much on $1k/month? It's simple content. It's not like it needs to do complex business logic in the backend.
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600 - Dec 2025 (363 comments)
