What's the Real Cost of Hosting an E-Commerce Website on Vercel, AWS and More?

Vercel is a platform for deploying websites that has won the favor of many developers with its seamless deployment experience.

As you use Vercel to deploy your websites every day, have you ever wondered about the actual cost of using it to deploy an e-commerce site?

You might instinctively answer, "Doesn't Vercel have a free plan?"

However, if you carefully read Vercel's pricing table and terms of service, you'll find that behind the illusion of "free," there are quite a few pitfalls.

The "Price" of Vercel's Free Plan

The Free Plan Prohibits Commercial Use: Vercel's terms of service clearly state that its "Hobby" (i.e., free) plan is limited to non-commercial, personal projects. Once your website involves any form of commercial activity—for example, an e-commerce site that generates sales revenue—you must upgrade to the paid Pro or Enterprise plan. This means that for e-commerce websites, Vercel's free deployment is a false proposition from the very beginning.

High Bandwidth Costs: Even if you upgrade to the Pro plan at $20/user per month, the real payment nightmare is just beginning. Vercel's bandwidth fees are the main part of the charges. Although the Pro plan includes 1TB of free bandwidth, for a moderately sized e-commerce site, this 1TB limit can be quickly exhausted, especially during promotional events. For usage beyond this, Vercel charges approximately $0.15 per GB.

What does this price mean? Let's make a simple comparison:

• Compared to established CDNs: For Amazon CloudFront (one of the world's leading CDN service providers), the bandwidth price for the same amount of usage is typically only a fraction of Vercel's, at around $0.085 per GB—almost half the cost.
• Compared to cloud storage: Vercel's bandwidth fees are even more expensive than the data transfer out fees for using Amazon S3 directly (an object storage service without CDN acceleration, thus its bandwidth is usually more expensive).

Over time, you might find that the bandwidth bills you pay to Vercel exceed all your other initial IT infrastructure expenses.

You might think you can get your business running on Vercel first and then migrate when the traffic grows. But I suggest considering migration as early as possible to avoid vendor lock-in with Vercel.

Otherwise, when you want to leave, you will find that the cost and complexity of migrating to other platforms are far greater than expected. In the end, you'll have to endure the exorbitant bills.

Alternative: Traditional Fixed Servers

So, if you don't use Vercel, what is the cost of manually deploying an e-commerce website on other cloud platforms?

We can use the traditional method of fixed-configuration servers. Typically, for an ordinary e-commerce website, a configuration of 1 vCPU and 1-2GB of memory is sufficient to handle initial traffic demands.

According to data provided by getdeploying.com, we can see the general prices for similar configurations as follows:

Note: Render offers a free instance plan, but it has an auto-sleep mechanism. This means if your website is not accessed for a period, it will go into a sleep state. When a new access request arrives, it can take up to a minute to wake up the service, which is disastrous for the customer experience of an e-commerce site.

However, the fixed-server approach also has its inherent flaws:

• Lack of Elasticity: The traffic of an e-commerce website is often bursty. For example, during "Black Friday," traffic can spike by tens or even hundreds of times in an instant. Fixed-configuration servers lack the ability to scale automatically. Once a traffic surge arrives, your website is likely to crash immediately, leading to interrupted transactions and significant losses.
• Continuous Billing: Regardless of whether your website has visitors, the charges begin the moment you purchase the server. For many e-commerce projects in the startup phase, this means paying a fixed server expense before generating any revenue.

So, is there a solution that can automatically scale and also avoid the Vercel trap?

Of course. Beyond Vercel and traditional fixed servers, you have a smarter, more cost-effective choice - Leapcell.

Leapcell uses an advanced Serverless architecture, bringing you the best of both worlds. It offers a deployment experience comparable to Vercel's convenience while fundamentally solving the problems of cost and scalability.

• Built for Traffic Bursts: Leapcell's architecture can automatically and instantly scale computing resources based on access requests. Even in the face of sudden traffic peaks, your website can remain stable and available, ensuring that no potential transaction is lost.
• True Pay-As-You-Go: Thanks to its event-driven model, Leapcell does not charge any computing fees when your website has no visitors. You only pay for the resources you actually use, significantly reducing costs during the project's cold-start phase.
• Developer Experience on Par with Vercel: Leapcell supports one-click deployment of mainstream front-end frameworks like Next.js. The entire process requires no complex configuration or server maintenance, allowing you to focus on your business itself.

Most importantly, Leapcell is committed to being a more developer-friendly platform and directly addresses Vercel's core pain points:

• Free Plan Supports Commercial Projects: Leapcell's free plan explicitly supports the deployment of commercial projects, so you don't have to worry about any restrictions in this regard from day one.
• Completely Free CDN: Leapcell provides a global, automated CDN service and does not charge any CDN bandwidth fees. Through efficient CDN offloading, you can easily reduce your bandwidth costs by over 80% compared to Vercel.

We are fully confident that Leapcell will become a fairer, more cost-effective, and more trustworthy alternative to Vercel. Visit Leapcell now to experience it for yourself.