Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.
edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
We're nuts for studying failure at the company and Heroku's margins was one of the things we considered to be one of the many nails in that coffin. (RIP)
(my rant here: https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run)
I had to hunt around for a host in a suitable geography with a spending limit, almost had to go on-prem (which will happen eventually, but not in the startup phase)
Waking up to bankruptcy because of bots out of your control visiting your website seems a little nuts. Adding some other bullshit on top (like cloudflare) seems even more nuts.
Yeah I can manage all that and have the machine stop responding when it hits a spending limit -- but why would I pay for the cloud if I have to build out that infrastructure?
grumble.
1. Because people vote with their wallets and not their mouths, and most companies would rather have a cost accident (quickly refunded by AWS) rather than everything going down on a saturday and not getting back up until finance can figure out their stuff.
2. Because realtime cost control is hard. It's just easier to fire off events, store them somewhere, and then aggregate at end-of-day (if that).
I strongly suspect that the way major clouds do billing is just not ready for answering the question of "how much did X spend over the last hour", and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan
You know, the same country whose former prime minister is this person: https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
Did I get something wrong?
Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.
Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.
This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.
Not trying to be obtuse, I really don't get how other providers can compete with that, I can't imagine Vercel's CDN is so significantly superior to make it worth it.
Definitely not just static content.
And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.
you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets)
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
>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 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.
Really hard to tell.
Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.
Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.
It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.
jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.
I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.
But your point stands, the amount of work they've put into this is remarkable.
https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
Use nitter or xcancel
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?
Guillermo reply: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600 - Dec 2025 (363 comments)
Vercel's pricing is so convoluted that you can't even compare usage. With render/railway you can at least predict that your biggest cost is going to be high.
2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platform among developers. All my homies hate Vercel.
You could also get a VPS from Digital Ocean or Hertzner, run open-source PaaS like Coolify, Dokploy, Caprover, etc.
Digital Ocean has app platform that’s lets you host these applications but more experience than VPS
Sealos has a $7 and $25 plan and work with Next.js
Just a few options. If you’re looking to leave Next.js completely, check out Tanstack Start. It’s by the creator of React-Query (defacto way to handle fetching data in Next.js). Still some rough edges but I think it could overtake Next.js once a bit more mature.
Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?
While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.
I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.
Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.
If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.
So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.
And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.
Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem.
Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.
Or if you go ping pong across containers to handle a single request. That will certainly make a laptop unable to handle this load.
I guess you would need some sort of search term to document id mapping that gets downloaded to the browser but maybe there's something more efficient than trying to figure out what everyone might be searching for in advance?
And how would you do searching for phrases or substrings? I've no idea if that's doable without having a database server-side that has the whole document store to search through.
there might be some piece I'm missing, but the first thing that comes to mind would be using that, possibly with the full-text search extension, to handle searching the metadata.
at that point you'd still be paying S3 egress costs, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't at least an order of magnitude less expensive than Vercel.
and since it's just static file hosting, it could conceivably be moved to a VPS (or a pair of them) running nginx or Caddy or whatever, if the AWS egress was too pricey.
Some cloud products have distorted an entire generation of developers understanding of how services can scale.
I’d interpret “thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day” as something like 10,000 people making ~5 requests per 24 hours. That’s 0.5 requests per second.
Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns
serving static content scales horizontally perfectly
They will sell you a 10Gbps uplink however, with (very reasonably priced) metered bandwidth.
I've hosted side projects on Hetzner for years and have never experienced anything like that. Do you have any references of projects to which it happened?
They offer unlimited bandwidth with their dedicated servers under a “fair usage” policy.
The bandwidth costs would be higher than what you pay monthly, so they would simply drop you.
You are probably using very little bandwidth, so it doesn’t matter in your case.
However, I assume Jmail consumes a very large amount of bandwidth.
But not because of being "not a profitable customer". Mind sharing some links here?
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.
roughly 47 percent of a recent US survey think supporting Israel is in the national interest of the United States, while 41 percent disagree. only 12 percent didn't offer an opinion. that's quite a lot of potential customers you're detracting when making a stupid political statement, especially taking a photo with a leader whom 49% of people "have an unfavorable opinion" of
Bangladesh: On 12 April 2025, Dhaka hosted what was described as the largest pro-Palestine protest in history, with an estimated 1,000,000 participants at Suhrawardy Udyan.
Italy: Between 3 and 5 October 2025, an estimated 2.3 to 3 million people participated in nationwide strikes and marches, marking the highest level of European mobilization during the conflict.
Spain: Over 1,000,000 people filled the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities in early October to support the "Sumud Flotilla" and demand an arms embargo.
Australia: Organisers estimated that over 300,000 to 350,000 people participated in nationwide rallies on 24 August 2025, following diplomatic tensions between the Australian and Israeli governments.
Netherlands: Approximately 250,000 people marched in Amsterdam’s "Red Line" protest in October, the third such major rally in as many months. "
I'm fully aware of my Jewish brothers and sisters who stand shoulder to shoulder with me against the current Israeli actions ... but, fuck Israel ... and all who support their current stance.
Frankly, watching Israel has been the closest we've come to having a petri dish to understand how Nazi'ism developed and rose. I have a better understanding now of how the Hitler Youth developed, and how cultural blindness, manipulation, nationalistic obsessives and ideologues enable a cancer to spread among its politics leading to full blown Nazism. I have a better understanding of all of that from watching the current Israeli state and reading about it's history.
It's a disgusting tale and shouldn't have been funded by US taxpayers.
$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.
I don't understand how those are in the same ballpark? I thought saying something is in the same ballpark suggested that they are similar in scale, and the implication is that little-leauge does not play in the same ballpark as a NBA team. They are in the same category (baseball), but not at all the same level.
50k/mo is 600,000/yr vs 360/yr at 30/mo. Thats existential for a 1MM/yr company. Neither register on a balance sheet for a 1B/yr company. They are both closer to 0 than being a major cost.
Even 50k and 30 I would not say are in the same ballpark. I've worked for major corps and of course a cost saving of 50k/month would not register for the overall company but it probably would for my team. A saving of 30/month is probably not worth spending any considerable amount of time on in most non-personal contexts.
That seems extremely expensive. What the heck?
Is he using Vercel Functions as well?
I think this is where some SPA + a few instances of a Node.js server + Redis would be much cheaper.
I'd say you can probably serve this much on $1k/month? It's simple content. It's not like it needs to do complex business logic in the backend.