Helping a customer migrate from an existing CDN to Vercel. This service advertises itself as not charging for bandwidth. Extensive marketing plastered all over social media. Imagine my surprise when I look at their renewal order form… first 2 items? Bandwidth and Requests. The reality: the service is "free an unlimited" until their Enterprise sales team gets their hands on you. And they will. They're hoping that you're in too deep at that point. They're hoping that they can crowd social media with enough loud voices about how awesome the "free" service is. Leaving the business model aside, is this how you want to live? The fundamental feedback loop of engineering is one in which you understand your costs, transparently, and how they scale. You make engineering choices, down to the code you write, based on that feedback loop. What's astonishing about this order form is just how similar the pricing is to a hyperscaler cloud. Except every real cloud provider operating at scale can't afford to deceive the world, and then play a game of chicken with ToS threats and sales teams. Which is why my prediction is that the music will be stopping soon.
