Vercel

Vercel is a cloud platform for deploying frontend applications, run by the company that develops Next.js. A project is connected to a Git repository, and every push triggers a build that is deployed to a global edge network, with pull requests receiving their own preview URLs so changes can be reviewed in a live environment. The platform provides serverless and edge functions for backend logic, image optimization, analytics, and managed caching, so teams ship without configuring servers or CDNs themselves. Its close relationship with Next.js means framework features such as server components, incremental static regeneration, and middleware are supported there first, though the platform also hosts Vite, SvelteKit, Astro, and other frameworks. The AI SDK, also from Vercel, is widely used for building streaming chat interfaces against providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, and Cloudflare Workers compete in the same space. The recurring complaint is cost at scale, since usage-based pricing for bandwidth, function invocations, and image transformations is inexpensive for small projects but can grow sharply under heavy traffic, so teams with predictable high load sometimes move to their own infrastructure once the workload stabilizes.