Show HN: Self-Host Next.js in Production

The biggest cost for us on Vercel (several hundred dollars a month) was Image Optimization, and that was because the app was being majorly inefficient with images, in part due to some default behavior in Next.js that we found unfriendly [0], and in part due to negligence. That being said, it wasn't "cheap" by any means outside of that, still hundreds a month for something that I would not consider a high traffic application (I wish I could remember more specific numbers).

Migrating to OpenNext using SST, I think we got the bills for compute and asset serving down to like $15/day or something (granted, we spent expensive engineer time on the migration).

[0] https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/components/image#s...

That’s insanely expensive for a low traffic web app. Why should anyone use Next.js, given a choice? Are the handful of milliseconds shaved off for the end user worth the cost?

1) I don't think it's related to Next, per se, but there may be behavior I didn't build the expertise to comment on. I also know that there were major inefficiencies in the application, so, for example, our P90 latency was (imo) terrible.

2) We'd have to define what constitutes low traffic vs any other arbitrary measure, so it's moot to discuss like this; all I said it wasn't high traffic. You could run it for cheaper, but there wasn't much expertise for self-hosting, for example.

3) For all I remember it may have been half that in daily cost. In any case, miniscule compared to engineer time. What was worse was the prior decision to use serverless aurora rds, that dwarfed everything else in AWS cost - I know this is tangentially related, just saying optimizing that a bit more was not the highest priority, we could do it for cheaper.

People (me at least) us NextJS for the developer experience. It really is quite good. If you mean why use Vercel, again - great developer experience. Just expensive.