# 10 Vercel Alternatives in 2026: Full-Stack and EU-Hosted

> Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Northflank, Coolify, Clever Cloud, Scalingo and Runsite — which run a live process, and who operates each.

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DeploymentAugust 14, 202615 min read

# 10 Vercel Alternatives in 2026 for Full-Stack Apps, Not Just the Frontend

Ten platforms that replace Vercel, compared on the thing that decides it: whether each one runs a long-lived process, and who operates it.

## The short version

Vercel hosts build output and functions, and is good at it. A list of alternatives never resolves because the names on it are four different shapes of hosting. Count what your application actually has first: a process that must stay alive, state, scheduled work, files that outlast a deploy. Several of those mean a container.

[Teo Marquardt](/about#author)· Updated August 29, 2026

The short version. If you deploy build output and nothing else, Cloudflare Pages and Netlify are the closest swaps and the cheapest. If your application has a server in it — a process that stays alive, a database, a queue, a nightly job — then Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are the same shape as Vercel and will leave you where you are; the platforms that change something are Render, Railway, Fly.io and Northflank. If the invoice is the problem, Coolify on European hardware. If somebody has asked whose law governs your users’ data, the three with an EU operating company are Clever Cloud, Scalingo and Upsun — Runsite, which publishes this page, keeps the data in the EU but is not itself an incorporated company. All ten are described below, with the property that separates them.

Open three lists of Vercel alternatives and the same names appear in a different order: Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, Railway, Fly.io, and a self-hosted control plane on a rented box. The ranking is the part that does not work. Those are not competing products. They are four different shapes of hosting, and a table that sorts them by feature count is holding a CDN up against a container scheduler and declaring a winner.

Which is why the lists cannot help you, and why the answer changes completely depending on something none of them asks. A site that compiles to files and a Next.js application with a database, a queue and a nightly job are two unrelated hosting problems that happen to share a starting point. Until you have said which one you have, a ranked list is answering a question nobody asked.

Two adjacent questions are out of scope here. If you are leaving a platform and want to know what has to be unpicked before you can move at all, that mechanic is worked through in [what you are actually detaching from Railway](/blog/railway-alternatives). If the real question is whether to run the platform layer on a server you administer, the ledger for that is in [self-hosted PaaS versus managed](/blog/coolify-vs-managed-paas). What follows is about the shape of your application and the shape of the thing that should be running it.

## Why the swap question is shaped wrong

Vercel deploys the output of your build and a set of serverless functions, and as of writing that is the boundary of what it runs. It is very good inside that boundary. What it does not include, by design rather than by omission, is a process that stays alive between requests, a database, a queue, a scheduler, or a filesystem that survives the next deploy. Those are all real requirements of an ordinary application, and on Vercel each one is satisfied by something you buy separately and connect over the network.

Follow that through and the consequence is structural. An application that started as a frontend and grew a backend is, by the time it needs alternatives, distributed across a hosting platform, a database vendor, possibly a cache, an object store for anything users upload, and a scheduler for the jobs that have to run whether or not a request arrives. Nobody chose that architecture in a meeting. It accumulated, one integration at a time, because the platform underneath supplied the first piece and not the rest.

You are not moving one thing

This is why "what should I use instead of Vercel" resists a one-line answer. The thing you are moving is not a deployment. It is a set of decisions about where each part of your application lives, several of which were made implicitly, and a replacement platform will absorb some of them and leave others exactly where they are. The list of alternatives is the last step of that decision, not the first.

## Four things a full-stack app needs that a frontend platform doesn't have

A platform that deploys build output and functions leaves exactly four gaps open: a process that stays alive between requests, state that has to live somewhere, work that runs on a schedule, and files that outlast a deploy. None of them is a defect. They follow from what that kind of platform is for, and every one of them is already a line item you pay for somewhere else, or a workaround you have already built.

### A process that stays alive

A serverless function has a ceiling on how long it may run, and as of writing the exact ceiling varies by plan and has changed more than once, so the number matters less than the fact that one exists. Anything that wants to outlive a request runs into it: a WebSocket connection held open for a collaborative editor, a server-sent event stream, an import that takes four minutes on a large file, a worker that drains a queue continuously rather than in bursts. The usual workarounds are to split the work into chunks that each fit under the limit, or to move that one piece onto a second platform that runs containers, which is how a stack ends up with two hosting providers. The related tax on the same seam, an instance that has to be started before it can answer, is covered in [why free-tier apps fall asleep](/blog/cold-starts).

### State that lives somewhere

No database comes with the box, so you attach one, and the attachment has a property that surprises people the first time they meet it. A function is an instance that appears for one invocation, which means a naive database client opens a connection per invocation, and a burst of traffic turns into a burst of connections against a server that has a hard limit on how many it will hold. This is not the database misbehaving. It is a runtime with no long-lived process meeting a protocol that assumes one, and the fix is a pooler in between, which is a component you now operate or pay for. What the pooler is actually doing, and why the two ports matter, is in [connection pooling with PgBouncer](/blog/pgbouncer-connection-pooling). A platform that runs a container sidesteps the problem rather than solving it, because the process is already there and holds its own pool, and [managed PostgreSQL hosted in the EU](/services/postgresql) is then an endpoint rather than an architecture.

### Scheduled and background work

Every application acquires work that is not triggered by a visitor: expiring sessions, sending the digest, reconciling a payment provider, retrying whatever failed overnight. On a frontend platform these live as an add-on, usually a scheduler that calls one of your functions on a timer, which works and inherits the execution ceiling from the section above. On a platform that runs containers they are ordinary services, and a queue consumer is simply a process that is always running. If you have been keeping a job alive by having an external service ping a URL every five minutes, that is the workaround this gap produces, and [managed cron jobs that run as a first-class service](/services/cron-jobs) alongside [managed Redis for caches and job queues](/services/redis) is what replacing it looks like.

### Files that survive a deploy

There is no writable disk, or more precisely there is one that disappears with the instance, so anything a user uploads has to go somewhere addressable from the moment it arrives. Why that is true of nearly every modern deployment target, not only this one, is explained in [how git push to deploy actually works](/blog/git-push-to-deploy). The practical consequence is an object store in the stack from day one, and the thing to check on it is not capacity but transfer, since serving user media is mostly egress. On Runsite that line is [object storage with no egress charges](/services/s3-storage); elsewhere it is metered, and metered transfer is the part of a storage bill that grows with your traffic rather than with your data.

## The bill is a different shape than the pricing page

Cost is the reason most people start reading about alternatives, and the pricing page is a poor guide to it, because the parts that move are not the parts printed in large type. Three things are metered rather than fixed as of writing: outbound bandwidth, function execution, and the number of people on the team. A plan price plus three meters is not a monthly cost, it is a monthly estimate, and the months where it is wrong are the months where something went right and traffic arrived. Worth checking separately, because it catches people at the worst moment: as of writing the free tier carries a restriction on commercial use, which is set out on [Vercel's own pricing page](https://vercel.com/pricing) and is the kind of clause that surfaces when a side project starts taking money.

The second half of the arithmetic is the one nobody puts in a comparison table. Because the platform supplies one piece of the application, the other pieces have their own invoices, and each of those is metered on its own terms. The database bills for storage and often for compute time. The object store bills for what it stores and, on most providers, again for every byte a visitor downloads, which is the mechanic taken apart in [why downloading your own data costs so much](/blog/s3-egress-fees). Add the scheduler, add the observability tool that replaced the logs you used to have. The total cost of a Vercel-shaped stack cannot be read off Vercel's pricing page in principle, which is why the number people quote from memory is usually the smallest of the several they pay.

## Which of the ten, picked by what you are deploying

With the gaps and the meters named, the candidates sort themselves into four shapes, and the question that picks one is what you are deploying rather than which platform ranks highest. The table below is deliberately built on the last column, which is the one that decides whether a migration was worth doing.

| What you are deploying                                 | The shape that fits                           | What it changes                                             | What it does not                                            |
| ------------------------------------------------------ | --------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- |
| Build output only, no server at request time           | A static host with a CDN                      | Bandwidth model, build pipeline, the amount you operate     | Anything that needs to run when a request arrives           |
| A server that has to be running                        | A container platform                          | Execution ceilings, connections, schedules, background work | That the database and the object store still live somewhere |
| The same stack, and a customer asked whose law applies | A European operating company                  | The sentence you send to a security review                  | The amount of migration work, which is the same either way  |
| The same stack, and the invoice is the problem         | The platform layer on infrastructure you rent | Monthly cost, and how much of the operations you own        | That somebody has to be awake when it breaks                |

Sorted by the shape of the application rather than by rank. The final column is where migrations disappoint people.

The first row is the honest answer more often than people expect. If what you deploy is the output of a build, a static host with a CDN is a smaller and cheaper thing than a platform with a functions runtime attached, and [static site hosting with a global CDN and EU-hosted builds](/services/static-sites) does the job for Astro, Hugo, Vite, SvelteKit and a Next.js static export. The lateral move belongs here too, and it should be named plainly: Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are the same shape of platform as Vercel, so moving between them changes the interface, the metering and the ecosystem, and leaves all four gaps from the previous section exactly where they were.

The second row is what most people who are unhappy with a frontend platform actually want. A container runs your process, holds its own connection pool, runs a worker next to the web server, and has no execution ceiling to design around. [A European container platform that runs a long-lived process rather than a function](/services/web-services) is the same category as Render, Railway and Fly.io, and the comparison between two of those, including what their two billing models each get wrong, is in [Render vs Railway](/blog/render-vs-railway).

The third and fourth rows describe the same application arriving from a different direction. If what pushed you was a question about jurisdiction, the group that answers it is platforms whose operating company is established in the EU: Clever Cloud, Scalingo and Upsun among them, and what "European" can legitimately mean is set out in [choosing a European Heroku alternative](/blog/european-heroku-alternative). If the constraint is the invoice, the answer is running Coolify, Dokploy, Dokku or Kamal on European hardware from Hetzner, Scaleway, OVHcloud, Exoscale or UpCloud, and what that hands you along with the saving is priced in [what self-hosting a PaaS actually costs](/blog/coolify-vs-managed-paas).

## 10 Vercel alternatives in 2026, and what each one actually replaces

Here they are by name, with the two columns that decide the outcome. The first is whether the platform runs a long-lived process, because that single property is what separates a Vercel replacement from a Vercel repaint — four of the ten do not, and moving to one of those leaves every gap from the previous section exactly where it was. The second is where the operating company is registered, which is what determines whose law reaches your users’ data, regardless of which region you pick from a dropdown.

| Platform              | Runs a long-lived process?      | Operator registered in                              | Best for                                                      |
| --------------------- | ------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Netlify               | No — build output and functions | United States                                       | A lateral move with a familiar workflow                       |
| Cloudflare Pages      | No — static plus Workers        | United States                                       | Static sites, and the cheapest bandwidth of the ten           |
| Render                | Yes                             | United States                                       | The frontend platform swapped for a real container platform   |
| Railway               | Yes                             | United States                                       | Full-stack projects where the services reference each other   |
| Fly.io                | Yes                             | United States                                       | Apps that must run close to users in several regions          |
| Northflank            | Yes                             | United Kingdom                                      | Production controls, or running in your own cloud account     |
| Coolify (self-hosted) | Yes — on your server            | Open source — you rent the box                      | The smallest invoice, if you own the operations               |
| Clever Cloud          | Yes                             | France                                              | A French operator with a broad managed catalogue              |
| Scalingo              | Yes                             | France                                              | Workloads that have to survive a compliance review            |
| Runsite               | Yes                             | Not incorporated — sole operator, EU infrastructure | EU-only data, a fixed bill, and no cold starts on active apps |

Ten alternatives to Vercel, as of writing. The second column is the one that decides whether a migration solves anything.

### 1\. Netlify — the closest swap, and the one that changes least

Netlify is the same shape of platform as Vercel: a git-based workflow, deploy previews, build output served from a CDN, and functions for the parts that need to execute. Moving is close to frictionless, which is exactly the warning. The interface changes, the metering changes and the ecosystem changes; the four gaps stay open, because a platform built on the same model has the same boundary. It is the right answer if your complaint is commercial — pricing, a plan restriction, a support experience — and the wrong one if your complaint is that your application outgrew the model.

### 2\. Cloudflare Pages — the cheapest, if you really are static

For a site that compiles to files, Cloudflare Pages is hard to beat on cost, and its bandwidth model is the reason it wins almost every listicle. Workers cover the parts that need to run, within the constraints of a runtime that is not Node and does not hold a connection open across requests. That last detail is where projects get caught: a Next.js app with a database behaves differently on a Workers runtime than on a server, and finding out mid-migration is expensive. If your output really is files — Astro, Hugo, Vite, SvelteKit, a Next.js static export — this or [static hosting with an EU-built CDN](/services/static-sites) is a smaller and cheaper thing than any platform in this table.

### 3\. Render — the frontend platform swapped for a container platform

This is the row most people leaving Vercel actually want. Render runs a container, which means the process stays alive between requests, holds its own database connection pool, has no execution ceiling to design around, and can run a background worker beside the web server. Managed Postgres and a Redis-compatible store sit next to it, so three of the four gaps close at once. Its free tier stops an idle service, which matters for demo links — see [why free-tier apps fall asleep](/blog/cold-starts). US operator.

### 4\. Railway — when the app is several services that know about each other

Railway makes an architecture legible as a graph rather than a list of unrelated dashboard entries, and it provisions Postgres and Redis inside the same project boundary as the code. For an application that is a web service plus a worker plus two datastores, that is a genuinely better mental model than assembling the same thing from four vendors. Billing is metered against actual consumption, which is honest and occasionally surprising. What that graph costs to take apart later is the subject of [Railway alternatives](/blog/railway-alternatives), and the head-to-head with Render is in [Render vs Railway](/blog/render-vs-railway). US operator.

### 5\. Fly.io — when the latency budget is spent on the network

Fly.io runs containers in many regions and bills per second, with machines that can scale to zero between requests. If you left Vercel because you liked being close to users but needed a real server, this is the shape that keeps both. The cost is that you are now reasoning about where each machine lives and what happens when one region is unhealthy, which is more operational thinking than a single-region platform asks of you. Its managed database offering has changed more than once, so check what is actually managed on the day you look. US operator.

### 6\. Northflank — production controls, or your own cloud account

Northflank aims further toward a production platform than Vercel does: pipelines, preview environments, explicit control over how a release rolls out, and the option to run everything inside a cloud account you own rather than the vendor’s. Worth knowing before you file it under "European": the operator is Northflank Ltd, registered in London, which since Brexit means the United Kingdom rather than the EU. The UK holds an adequacy decision at the time of writing, which is not the same as being inside the union, and the difference is one a procurement questionnaire will notice — see [Schrems II and EU data transfers](/blog/schrems-ii-data-transfers) for why adequacy is a decision that can be revisited.

### 7\. Coolify — the open-source answer, and the smallest invoice

Of everything in this table, Coolify is the one people arrive at straight from a Vercel invoice, because the arithmetic is startling: the four gaps close at once on a single rented machine, and the monthly figure is the price of the machine. It is not a hosting company — it is software you install and then run, and the dashboard’s resemblance to a managed platform hides the fact that nobody else is watching it. Dokploy, Dokku, Kamal and CapRover cover the same idea with less UI. The honest version of the arithmetic, including the hours nobody bills you for, is in [what self-hosting a PaaS actually costs](/blog/coolify-vs-managed-paas).

### 8\. Clever Cloud — a French operator with a wide catalogue

The relevant thing about Clever Cloud from a Vercel seat is that it closes all four gaps under one operator: a runtime that keeps your process alive, databases, an object store for uploads, and somewhere for scheduled work to run. That collapses the vendor sprawl described at the top of this page back into a single bill and a single support desk. It is French, which also settles the jurisdiction column, and it bills per second, so an application with quiet nights is not charged as though it were busy. Where it costs you is familiarity: the deploy flow is not modelled on Vercel and the first week will feel like relearning something you already knew.

### 9\. Scalingo — built to survive a compliance review

Reach for Scalingo when the thing blocking you is not the architecture but a document. It is a French operator with French infrastructure and the certifications a regulated buyer expects to see named, which is what a stalled security review is usually waiting for. Upsun, Platform.sh SAS in Paris, sits beside it with a different emphasis: every branch can get a full environment with its own copy of the data, which is a stronger version of the preview deployments you are used to and a heavier machine to run. Neither is the cheapest row here, and neither is trying to be. What a review of this kind actually asks for is listed in [GDPR data residency](/blog/gdpr-data-residency).

### 10\. Runsite — an EU operator, a fixed bill, no cold starts on active apps

Ours, described with the parts that will not suit you. Runsite runs a container rather than a function, which is the whole difference this page is about: the process survives between requests, holds its own connection pool, and has no execution ceiling to design a job around. [Web services](/services/web-services), [PostgreSQL](/services/postgresql), [Redis](/services/redis) and [object storage](/services/s3-storage) each have an entry plan of €5/mo or less, so the four gaps close inside one invoice instead of four. It is operated by an individual developer rather than a registered company, so the jurisdiction column reads differently from Scalingo SAS or Clever Cloud SAS, and there is exactly one region, in Germany — if latency to users outside Europe is what you liked about Vercel, that is a real loss and you should weigh it. Plans are a flat monthly figure, so a quiet month costs the same as a busy one, which is a downgrade if your traffic is genuinely spiky. Active apps do not cold-start even on the entry Nano plan, and every plan ships a signed [data processing agreement](/blog/what-is-a-data-processing-agreement-dpa).

Six of the ten are operated from outside the EU

None of that is a mark against them — Cloudflare’s bandwidth economics and Render’s simplicity are each better than what the EU rows offer. It does mean that a migration between any two of those six is a change of dashboard and pricing model with the legal position untouched, no matter which region you select at signup. Ignore the column outright if nobody has raised it. The moment somebody does, it is the only column in the table capable of answering them.

## The Next.js question

For a large share of the people reading this, the worry underneath the search is not hosting in general but Next.js hosting in particular. The framework is developed by Vercel, and the reasonable version of the concern is not about licensing, which is permissive, but about the features whose behaviour depends on what is running underneath them. As of writing, the ones that come up are:

* **Incremental static regeneration**, which needs somewhere to hold and invalidate the regenerated pages.
* **Image optimisation**, which needs a process to transform images on demand and a cache to keep the results.
* **Middleware on the edge runtime**, which runs in a restricted environment rather than in a normal Node process.
* **Streaming and partial rendering**, which need the connection held open while the response is assembled.

None of these is proprietary, and the framework's own [self-hosting documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs/app/getting-started/deploying) covers how each is supported outside Vercel, which is the source worth reading rather than any vendor's summary of it. What decides the outcome is the hosting shape from the table above. A static export removes the server entirely, and with it everything on that list that needs one, which simplifies a content site enormously and breaks an application. A container running the framework's own server keeps most of the list, because the implementation ships with the framework; the edge runtime is the exception, having been designed around infrastructure a container does not have. Which of the two your project wants is a decision in its own right and a subject for another article.

What ties you is the implementation, not the framework

Framework lock-in is the wrong thing to worry about here; the code travels. What travels less well is the set of features whose implementation was supplied by the platform, since those are the ones that quietly stop working, or start costing money you were not paying, on a host that supplies them differently. Check that list against your own application before you compare anything, and you will know which rows of the table are even open to you.

## Where the operator is registered

One question survives every comparison in this article, and the lists almost never contain it. Vercel Inc. is a US company as of writing, which is stated in its own terms, and so are Netlify, Cloudflare, Render, Railway and Fly.io. Choosing a region does not change that. A region determines where the bytes are written, which is worth requiring and helps with latency, and it says nothing about which government can compel the company operating the service. Moving between US platforms is a change of billing model and interface with the jurisdiction question left exactly where it was.

If nobody has asked you whose law applies to your customers' data, this row of the table is not binding and you can skip it. If somebody has, or if you sell to anyone with a procurement process, the property that answers it is where the operating company is established, not where the region is. The three different things the word "European" gets used to mean, and which of them survives a security questionnaire, are set out in [choosing a European Heroku alternative](/blog/european-heroku-alternative). Settling it while you are still choosing costs you an afternoon of reading; settling it afterwards costs you the migration twice.

## How Runsite handles it

Starting with what does not exist. There is no import tool: Runsite does not read a Vercel project, does not convert a configuration file, and does not ship a Next.js adapter of its own. There is one region, in Germany, so if you need to serve Sydney from Sydney this is the wrong answer. Static assets are cached at edge locations, and that is a cache rather than an execution environment, which means code running at the edge is not something Runsite offers and middleware written for that runtime is not a thing to plan around here.

What it does have is the two shapes from the top of the table under one account. [Static site hosting with EU-hosted builds](/services/static-sites) covers a build that produces files, with unlimited sites and 100 GB of bandwidth a month on the free tier, automatic SSL on your own domain, and a preview URL per pull request. [Web services on EU infrastructure](/services/web-services) cover the case where a process has to be running, from a free tier of one service at 0.1 vCPU and 256 MB up to 8 vCPU and 16 GB, with your Dockerfile used when you supply one and the stack detected for Next.js, Django, Rails, FastAPI and others when you do not. Deploys are rolling behind a health check with automatic rollback, a choice explained in [blue-green versus rolling deployments](/blog/blue-green-vs-rolling-deployments), and active applications do not cold-start even on the entry Nano plan; a service there sleeps only after 14 days idle.

On the bill, the shape is the opposite of a meter, and the trade goes both ways. Plans are fixed monthly prices as of writing, from €3 to €180, so an application that idles for twenty hours a day may genuinely cost less on a consumption meter than it does here; the thing a fixed plan buys is knowing the number in advance. The pieces from the four gaps sit alongside it rather than at other vendors: [managed PostgreSQL hosted in the EU](/services/postgresql) from €3/mo and [managed Redis](/services/redis) from €5/mo, [managed cron jobs](/services/cron-jobs), and [object storage with no egress charges](/services/s3-storage) at €0.025 per GB per month after 5 GB free. All of it runs in the one region, there is no replication to non-EU regions, and a signed [GDPR data processing agreement](/blog/what-is-a-data-processing-agreement-dpa) comes with every account. Setup details are in the [Runsite docs](https://docs.runsite.app).

## The short version

Vercel is a platform for build output and functions, and it is good at that. The reason a list of alternatives never resolves is that the names on it are four different shapes of hosting, and which shape you need is decided by four things your application either has or does not: a process that must stay alive, state that has to live somewhere, work that runs on a schedule, and files that outlast a deploy. Count how many of those you have before you compare anything. If the answer is none, you want a static host and you have been overpaying for a functions runtime you do not use. If the answer is most of them, you want a container.

Then check the two things that no feature matrix contains: which Next.js features you depend on and where their implementation comes from, and which legal entity is named in the terms you are agreeing to. Those decide whether a migration solves your problem or relocates it. If it turns out you want the second row of the table, [a European platform that runs your container from your own Dockerfile](/services/web-services) has a free tier, and one service deployed onto it will tell you more in an afternoon than another ranked list will.

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## Web Services on Runsite

Deploy from a single git push and keep active apps warm — no cold starts, hosted entirely in the EU with a signed GDPR DPA on every plan.

[Explore Web Services](/services/web-services)

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FAQ

## Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about this service.

### What is better than Vercel?

Nothing is better in the abstract, because the platforms usually offered as answers are not the same kind of product. Vercel deploys build output and serverless functions. A static host with a CDN does less than that and costs less, and if your project compiles to files it is the better fit. A container platform such as Render, Railway, Fly.io or Runsite does something different: it runs a process that stays alive, which is what you want if your application holds WebSocket connections, streams responses, drains a queue, or runs a job longer than a function is allowed to run. So the useful question is what you deploy. If it is a frontend with a few API routes, Vercel is a short path and moving may not gain you much. If it is an application with a database, background work and files that have to persist, a container is the shape that removes the workarounds rather than rehousing them.

### What are some platforms similar to Vercel?

The closest in shape are Netlify and Cloudflare Pages, which also deploy build output with a functions runtime attached, and that similarity is the catch. If you are looking for alternatives because your application outgrew what a frontend platform runs, then a platform of the same shape will reproduce the same limits with a different dashboard. What differs between them is metering, the free tier, build behaviour and ecosystem, which matters if those are your reasons for moving. If the reason is the shape, the comparable products are container platforms rather than frontend platforms, and among them the choice is mostly about billing model and where the operating company is registered. Both of those, held against each other on two named platforms, are in the Runsite comparison of Render and Railway.

### What is cheaper than Vercel?

Almost anything can be, and almost anything can also be more expensive, because the two models fail in opposite directions. Metered billing charges for bandwidth, function execution and seats, so it is cheap when nothing is happening and unbounded when something is. A fixed monthly plan is the reverse: predictable, and wasteful for an application that idles most of the day. Neither is cheaper as a fact about the platform; it depends on your traffic shape, and the honest way to compare is to take last month's actual numbers rather than a projection. The part that gets left out of both estimates is that a frontend platform hosts one piece of your stack, so the database, the object store, the scheduler and the observability tool each arrive with their own bill, and on most object stores the bill grows every time a visitor downloads a file. Runsite charges fixed plans from €3/mo as of writing and does not meter egress on its object storage, which makes the total predictable rather than automatically smaller.

### What's better, Vercel or Netlify?

They are close enough that the answer usually comes down to preference, which is a hint that the comparison may be the wrong one. Both deploy build output with a serverless functions runtime beside it, both build from Git with preview deployments per pull request, and both meter bandwidth and function usage. Vercel has the tighter relationship with Next.js, since it develops the framework; Netlify is more neutral across generators and has its own set of build plugins. What neither of them changes is the shape: no long-lived process, no database included, no persistent disk, and scheduled work as an add-on. If those are what pushed you into comparing hosts, choosing between these two rearranges the problem rather than removing it, and the platforms that do remove it are the ones that run containers. Both companies are also registered in the US as of writing, so on the question of whose law governs your customers' data they give the same answer.

Keep reading

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Source: https://runsite.app/blog/vercel-alternatives