Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:

* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.

* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.

* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.

* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.

Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.

All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.

* that's just static files. Even a $4 droplets will hardly ever get into issues serving that, even with hundreds of simultaneous requests.

* Okay, I guess that means we should use 2? So that's $8 now.

* Vercel really doesn't help you there beyond serving static files from cdn. That hardly matters at this scale, you should keep in mind that you "only" add about 100ms of latency by serving from the other side of the globe. While that has an impact, it's not really that much. And you can always use another cdn too. They're very often free for html/js/css

* Burst traffic is an issue, especially trolls that just randomly DOS your public servers for shits and giggles. That's pretty much the only one vercel actually helps you against. But so would others, they're not the only ones providing that service, and most do it for free.

Frankly, the only real and valid reason is the previously mentioned: they've likely got the money and don't mind spending it for the ecosystem. And if they like it... Who are we to interfere? Aside from pointing out how massively they're overpaying, but they've gotta be able to handle that if they're willing to publish an article like this

Is this really playing the devil's advocate though? I know this is a simplification but Stack Overflow launched on a couple of IIS servers and rode their exponential growth rather well. Sure they added more than "a couple" of web servers and improved their SQL server quite a bit, but as far as I recall they didn't even shift to CDN until five or six years after they grew. Eventually they moved into the cloud, but Spliit doesn't even have a fraction of the traffic SO did in its early days. As such I don't think any of the challenges you mention are all that relevant in the context aside from having backup. Perhaps also some redundancy by having two $4 droplets?

Is the author even getting paid for their services though? If they aren't then why would they care? I don't mean that as rude as it sounds, but why would they pay that much money so people can use their product for free?

People use Vercel ... because...

...haven't worked it out yet, all I can come up with is "they don't know any better".

Surely that can't be true?

> may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.

Okay, am I crazy or can you not really solve this without going full on multi-region setup of everything? Maybe your web server is closer to them but database requests are still going back to the "main" region which will have latency.

Personally I'm digging a hole through the center of the earth to send data via pulsing laser to the far side. But other people can choose to waste their money on multi region relocation, sure.

Some serverless DB services claim to offer transparent geo replication (eg AWS DynamoDB, and MS Cosmos which known for being expensive though).

But also most apps don't need low latency.