Just to make it clear, I genuinely think they offer a crap deal. They justify being expensive, but what the end user gets in return is not worth it IMO. Do not host anything on Vercel if you can avoid it.

The point I'm making is that the billing becomes very clear once you treat them like a PaaS, not a cloud platform. It's like buying individual seats for corporate software that just happens to also host your application as a side effect. I feel like they make this fact pretty clear on the pricing page.

"$20/month" = a single license for vercel's own tooling

"+ additional usage" = whatever AWS + markup costs... they SHOULD link to the /limits docs [0] from here

"$20 of included usage credit" = "free" coupon to use the overpriced AWS services with the pitiful soft-limits listed in detail below

"Drag the sliders. Watch the $20 plan disappear." is a misreading of vercel's pricing chart. "Vercel Pro" was never 20$, especially not for 5 users, since that's 5 licenses for vercel's tooling, which is the ONLY thing they make here. You essentially get a coupon letting you use that tooling on AWS via their control panel, but beyond that they have 0 involvement in the cloud market. They list the soft limits under the column in the price chart, and they have that /limits page detailing their insanely marked up overage charges. [0] IMO, that's not hidden, it's just a bad deal.

They selfishly assume their tooling IS the product you're here for and whatever hurdles exist to use it will just be tanked. "theupsellgame.com" also complains that the hobby plan has no way to pay for it. Why would I sell the supermarket apples at my fruit stand placed directly in-front of the supermarket if you aren't going to also buy my superior Apple Eater's Experience package.

Again, I think they're leeches. I just think this site uses weak arguments for why Vercel is awful.

[0] https://vercel.com/docs/limits#on-demand-resources-for-pro

Vercel’s pricing page