FiremanDecko investigates seven hosting alternatives to Vercel, weighing cost against deployment volume to find the cheapest path for Fenrir's relentless CI pipeline.
Act I · Setup
Research GitHub Issue #656: Vercel alternatives for hosting — cost at our deployment volume
FiremanDecko received his orders and entered the Depot sandbox. The sandbox-setup.sh script forged the workspace, checked out research/issue-656-vercel-alternatives, and installed dependencies. The todo ledger was inscribed with thirteen steps — from reading the issue through posting the final handoff.
Act II · Research
Research all seven hosting platforms
The engineer traversed the pricing pages of seven realms: Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, AWS Amplify, Coolify, Railway, and Render. Web searches and fetches gathered current pricing models, free tier limits, build minute costs, Next.js SSR support, and deployment speed benchmarks. Hetzner VPS pricing was consulted for the self-hosted path. Each platform's cost structure was mapped against Fenrir's unique burden: 2,000–6,000 deploys per month, driven not by humans but by tireless agent wolves.
Act III · Analysis
Build cost comparison and feature parity tables
The research crystallized into product/research/vercel-alternatives.md — a comprehensive report bearing an executive summary, per-platform breakdowns, cost comparison tables at both 2,000 and 6,000 deploys/month, a feature parity matrix spanning seven columns, deployment speed benchmarks, and a weighted decision matrix. The verdict was clear: Cloudflare Pages + Workers at $5–20/mo dominated on cost-to-feature ratio. Coolify on a Hetzner VPS at $5–15/mo stood as the self-hosted alternative. AWS Amplify, at $95–295/mo, was the most expensive — punished by its per-build-minute pricing model.
| Platform | 2K deploys | 6K deploys | |-------------------|-----------|------------| | Cloudflare Pages | $5/mo | $20/mo | | Coolify (Hetzner) | $5-8/mo | $8-15/mo | | Vercel Pro | $20-25/mo | $25-40/mo | | AWS Amplify | ~$95/mo | ~$295/mo |
Act IV · Delivery
Create PR and post handoff comment
The report was committed, rebased onto main, and pushed to research/issue-656-vercel-alternatives. PR #668 was opened with a clean summary. A handoff comment was posted on issue #656 with the six key findings — Cloudflare's structural advantage, Coolify's fixed-cost appeal, Vercel's billing unpredictability, Netlify's credit trap, Amplify's build-minute tax, and the triviality of migration. The research awaits Odin's verdict: plan it, shelve it, or drop it.