Vercel

If you're building on Next.js, you're deploying on Vercel. That's just the deal. Push to git, you get a working URL with edge caching, image optimisation, preview deployments per PR, and serverless functions in twelve regions. The whole thing is so smooth that most founders never realise they're sitting on top of AWS Lambda and CloudFront wearing a designer outfit. The killer feature isn't one specific thing. It's that the seams disappear. Push to a branch, get a preview URL. Open a PR, your teammate gets a comment with the preview link. Merge, production updates. Need to roll back? Click a button. The platform makes the easy path also the right path. After a few months you stop noticing the magic, which is the highest compliment a deploy tool can earn. The trade-off is cost. The Hobby plan ($0) is real and useful for personal projects. Pro at $20/user/month is the cost of doing business. Bandwidth and function invocations have generous limits but real overage prices, and once you scale you'll find yourself engineering around them. Edge Functions are powerful but easy to misuse if you forget they're not for heavy compute. And technically Hobby is personal-projects-only per their TOS, though enforcement is informal until you obviously commercialise something there. The AI SDK is genuinely good if you're building LLM features and v0 is becoming a real way to ship UI from prompts. If you're on Next.js and you're not on Vercel, you're paying a tax somewhere. Real talk: for non-Next.js frameworks (Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Remix), Vercel works but you're not the priority customer. Cloudflare Pages is cheaper at scale. Netlify is more framework-agnostic. Railway and Render are better for full-stack apps with databases. The recommendation is conditional: Next.js? Vercel. Anything else? Consider alternatives based on price and stack fit.