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Why not bare-cloud? Esp with AI... in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform.

Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.

The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.

if they had used hetzner Cloud servers, probably like 500 a month lol

They spend $$$ on marketing to execs. A couple of months ago my CEO came to me with a $30k Vercel app I could have done for $1500 on our own hardware.

Most people don't know what VPS and Node are.

This is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions

It’s just that simple!

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

450m page views in 1 month is only 173 requests per second. You can do that on a much cheaper box.

Well, https://jmail.world/jacebook-logo.png is 670KB by itself and loaded on initial load, so I think they might have blown your suggested traffic budget and still have some optimization to do.

Isn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.

well each view of an 'epstien file' is a pdf with images embeded so i think your 1mb might be not so generous.

There's a searchbar, and the amount of content you search through is far more than you could do with clientside search.

Definitely not just static content.

That's a good question. As someone bootstraping a few projects on Vercel this post has me looking over at the pricing sheet more closely.

Bandwith costs

Tech bros and VCs need to eat, that's how.

There is still a helluva lot of data to transfer to the client, I'm sure it's being stored somewhere.

And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.

no account needed -> https://www.threads.com/@qa_test_hq/post/DUkC_zjiGQh/media

It's also dumb because the original interaction happened on X https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post

With noscript active, I was able to see most of it.

>Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files

and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.

It's simply discounting the fees for that one user to zero.

(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)

So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)

You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).

So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.

Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.

To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.

You deduct the expenses you paid, not the income you hoped to earn.

Marketing probably, unless thew CEO pulls out his credit card

Yes, because accounts payable are valued at recognized revenue, and aren't being revalued at cost when written off.

Alternatively, bill the costs under the PR department as a marketing campaign.

Directly to CDN. Put it in a CloudFront distribution and it would be a fraction of a fraction of that Vercel bill.

Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.

This was there (way) before the last batch of files was released.

But your point stands, the amount of work they've put into this is remarkable.

or to a nitter instance, where you can actually read responses without signing in:

https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

Considering that Twitter doesn't show the original post for non-logged-in users, the screenshot on Threads actually provides a better reading experience for most people!

for fucks sakes, don’t link twitter

Use nitter or xcancel

Agreed, was slow to load and I just had to find the source post on X to view the real conversation "thread".

This is the first Threads link I've ever seen here. Is that what Threads mainly is, reposting X screenshots and starting a sidechain conversation?

the image makes it easier to see the top post and response together. also i guess the threads comments add extra context

Why wouldn't it be good to be associated with publicly exposing pedophiles, cannibals, murderers, and rapists? That seems to be a very good thing to be opposed to them.

Its good PR. He had some pretty bad PR recently that caused a lot of people to boycott the service. I assume this is him trying to regain trust or something?

That feels gross. I'd hate to have the risk of something that was meant to be redacted and not and now you have that on your own client.

I'm new to webdevelopment and was using Vercel because people told me it was good, but I was unaware that the company supported the genocide. What other similar services there are that you would recommend?

2nd point resonates with me, how come he wants to cover expenses, while being connected to Israeli PM and Epstein is connected to Israel through Ehud Barak.

Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?

Do you really think a $30 hetzner host can sustain that level of traffic performantly? Don't get me wrong, I love hetzner, but I would be very surprised if the numbers work out there.

Even before the Vercel CEO supporting a genocidal maniac. Vercel as a platform has been silently giving open source projects a "fuck you, pay me" when it comes to renewing benefits.

Have seen it happen to smaller projects and even pointed it out when Vercel took static sites down.

So they have always had a bad rep in my opinion.

$50k and €30 are of the same order of magnitude.

this seems like an unreasonably unchartiable reading of a relatively chill and nice situation