The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed

Re:The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed by mslev on Thursday April 30, 2026 @05:27PM (#47968433)

Funny timing - I was just on a call yesterday about renegotiating our enterprise Vercel contract. The Vercel employees on the call were very friendly, and did share information when prompted, BUT I came away from the call with the understanding that yep, their pricing is intentionally opaque. MIUs are 1 unit = $1, but the rate at which MIU are consumed vary by SKU. Which SKUs do you need, which are you using? Best of luck figuring that out. Cache hit? Fast Data Transfer. Cache miss? Fast Data Transfer _and_ Fast Origin Transfer, so 2x the cost.

For what its worth, they have an internal quoting tool, Copper, which we got a glimpse of on the call. This shows super detailed breakdowns of usage and pricing (for quoting, not actually for billing) and would be really useful to see...but of course they couldn't actually share that information with us.

Anyway, /rant. SaaS pricing being complex and not-exactly-user-friendly is nothing new.

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Re:The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed by bombcar on Thursday April 30, 2026 @07:25PM (#47969630)

Enterprise pricing always works out to “what can you pay? That’s exactly the price!”

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Re:The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed by gib444 on Friday May 01, 2026 @12:47AM (#47971387)

  price = what_you_can_pay * just_how_much_your_problem_is_hurting_you

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Re:The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed by vasco on Friday May 01, 2026 @01:51AM (#47971646)

This is a very naive take. It's so common to get big companies in as signal to others, or just match the current provider you have for X or offer you a cheap price to then hike it up next year, among many other sales tactics. It's definitely not "always ask for the most if the company has a lot". In fact I'd say companies with more money are more likely to get early good deals.

Have you done procurement yourself at the type of companies you describe?

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Re:The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed by RajT88 on Friday May 01, 2026 @11:18AM (#47975827)

I have sat through a few "license compliance" shakedowns. Sales guys intentionally misreading the license docs to see what they can talk customers into paying. Looking at you, Oracle.

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