News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @08:32AM (#29317556)
Lee from Vercel here. Happy to answer any questions about Vercel and our plans for this new round of funding.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by admn2 on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @12:50PM (#29320810)
Hi Lee, any plans to remove the restriction from the Hobby plan that disallows any sites transacting any sort of commerce? To my knowledge, Cloudflare Pages and Netlify don't have this restriction.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by miyuru on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:39AM (#29318282)
Any plans to add IPv6 support? I see that you use the 76.76.21.21 as a vanity IPv4 address surely you can do the same IPv6 as well.

This is the main reason I refer clients to Netlify as I use IPv6 support to measure the maturity of a platform and its engineers.

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by nostrebored on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:43AM (#29318332)
Why would you use this as a metric?

Working for AWS and working with hundreds of customers a whopping 0 of them ever required ipv6.

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by lwb on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @12:40PM (#29320693)
How do you feel about GCP?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by 0des on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:22AM (#29318126)
Hello Lee, congrats and thanks for taking questions.

In advance I'll apologize for being this direct, answers can get fishy sometimes these days, so I will parameterize my query, so to speak:

What portion (concrete numbers) are at minimum being earmarked for supporting open source projects and devs directly? I don't mean t-shirt budget and things, I mean what is the total amount of funds that will be donated directly to open source projects and devs?

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:51AM (#29318420)
Happy to clarify, but hard to give exact numbers. First, Next.js – we invest into our core team and also growing that community (events, supporting creators, etc). It's a major investment for us. Then, we have a bunch of other open-source libraries and frameworks that we support, like SWR, SWC, webpack, and friends. We also sponsor and support frontend frameworks like Nuxt, Astro, Svelte, etc (through OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors) as well as giving free Vercel accounts to teams like tailwindcss.com! Finally, we hired Rich Harris (creator of Svelte) to work on Svelte full-time and grow that open-source community.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by 0des on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:32AM (#29318965)
Thank you for the response; should we interpret this as there will be minimal transactions in the form of direct donations of currency to open source projects and developers? I hope this isn't taken as you being grilled, I just had a specific question that I don't feel has yet been answered.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @11:15AM (#29319567)
We do direct donations to open source projects through OpenCollective, GitHub Sponsors, and more.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by 0des on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @11:16AM (#29319574)
This is the response I was looking for, thank you.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by cercatrova on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:13PM (#29333904)
Just curious, if you already have NextJS, why support other frameworks like Svelte, Nuxt etc? Aren't they competitors in a way? Or is it more that Vercel is a platform that can host any framework so as long as customers use Vercel versus others, you don't really care which framework they use?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by somniomium on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @08:40PM (#29326053)
Any plans introducing better and more transparent growth usage plans in between Pro and Enterprise? We have been faced with surprising charges that weren't clearly defined besides 'fair usage' policy.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by jjallen on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @08:51AM (#29317753)
Thanks Lee.

So what are your plans for this funding? I know that Vercel just raised $100M a few months ago (it seems).

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @08:58AM (#29317839)
We're using the funding to:

- Support open-source projects

- Make the Web Edge-first

- Build the end-to-end development platform

- Grow our team

Happy to dive further into any of these. We did raise our Series C in June: https://vercel.com/blog/series-c-102m-continue-building-the-....

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by terpimost on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:08AM (#29317953)
Vercel is great! Any plans to have some kind of DB or object storage?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:25AM (#29318882)
:)
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by halfmatthalfcat on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:58AM (#29319300)
How can you possibly make the entire Web edge first? Would a precondition not be to capture all of the web traffic through Vercel first?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by no_wizard on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:59AM (#29318547)
Why did you jump the question above this asking for concrete numbers on open source support? I’m interested in this as well
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:25AM (#29318877)
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by no_wizard on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:55AM (#29319257)
As noted in reply to that comment you skipped the part that is really the meat of the question.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @11:16AM (#29319581)
We do direct donations to open source projects through OpenCollective, GitHub Sponsors, and more. Sorry that wasn't more clear!
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by outside1234 on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:51AM (#29318425)
What do you mean by edge first?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:58AM (#29318524)
We believe the future of the frontend is "at the edge"[1], meaning it's as close to your customers as physically possible. The only way to beat the speed of light is to be closer[2]. Frameworks and tooling should be designed with this constraint from the start[3].

[1] https://vercel.com/edge

[2] https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-application...

[3] https://vercel.com/features/infrastructure

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by machiaweliczny on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @02:52PM (#29322462)
My out of ass opinion. This edge stuff could be nice if only there was some good DB that utilised this model. Then we could have simple to write/work web apps competitive with mobile (if only Safari supported preload)
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by siquick on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @05:13PM (#29324229)
Planet Scale is probably the closest to what you're describing here.

https://planetscale.com/

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by itwy on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:09AM (#29318663)
They gave CDN a new name to milk venture capitalists.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:25AM (#29318867)
To me, the difference between a CDN and an Edge Network is that the former is for hosting static assets, where as the latter is for both storage _and_ code execution.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by youngtaff on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @03:20PM (#29322878)
The three major CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly) all support code execution at the edge, and all have (or will have) storage at the edge too

There's also a real question of whether Vercel and Netlify are really at the edge when they’re mainly running in AWS, GCP etc data centers rather than deploying their own hardware at edge locations, ISPs etc.

Don't get me wrong I think Vercel and Netlify are interesting but they seem to talk about being ‘on the edge’ while they really aren’t ATM

Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by joshxyz on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:28PM (#29332541)
Shhh the vcs might hear ya haha
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by pokepim on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @08:59AM (#29317852)
Is Vercel a Netlify alternative mainly focused on React? I've been using Netlify a lot because I have been developing mostly in Vue and sometimes a bit using Nuxt. What was most enticing to me (apart from free tier for personal projects, but I see Vercel has one too?) is that there were a lot of tutorials, guides how to setup CI/CD using Azure Devops/Github etc. So basically no matter what I have chosen there was neat guide for the system. I know that its nothing too complicated to create one from scratch but trying out new tools without documentation might be sometimes too bothersome and there are sometimes things that could take a lot of time to solve on your own. I hope you guys will also provide some guides how to integrate Vercel with existing projects on Azure Pipelines or other CI/CD alternatives. Would really want to try a compare.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:14AM (#29318024)
We're focused on supporting all frontend frameworks (and we created Next.js, so that's one of our favorites). You are correct, we have a free tier for your personal projects. While we do have git integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, you can always build custom CI/CD with our CLI/API to support your provider of choice. Good feedback on a guide specifically for Azure, we will create this!
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by sydthrowaway on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:19AM (#29318076)
How are you going to stop Facebook employing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by archeroed on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:25AM (#29318870)
React is free and open source, they could always fork it and I guess they are protecting their backs by supporting Vue and Svelte ( employed the creator full time to work on Svelte )
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by zain on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:23AM (#29318845)
Any support fo HIPAA compliant workflows?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by damsta on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:02AM (#29317873)
Any plans to support Vue as well?
Re:Vercel raises $150M Series D by leerob on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:09AM (#29317964)
We already support Vue and Nuxt (and all other frontend frameworks): https://vercel.com/new/templates