Why I'm Betting on Vercel's AI Cloud

The old deal is broken

Here’s how most small businesses end up with their tech stack. You Google “build a website,” you land on Squarespace or Wix, you pick a template, and you’re live by Friday. It looks good. It works. And then you hit the wall.

You want a chatbot. Not supported — or you’re paying for a third-party plugin with 50 free entries and a paywall. You want a custom form that triggers a workflow. You’re writing Zapier chains. You want to change how something fundamentally works. You can’t. The template doesn’t allow it. The platform doesn’t allow it. You’re renting a furnished apartment and you’re not allowed to move the furniture.

WordPress is the same story with more complexity. Sure, you “own” the code — in theory. In practice, you’re managing plugins, security patches, hosting bills, and a CMS that was designed in 2003. I’ve watched clients spend $3,000 on a WordPress site that still doesn’t do what they need.

The deal used to be: give up control for convenience. That tradeoff made sense when the alternative was hiring a developer for $150/hour.

It doesn’t make sense anymore.

What changed

Two things happened at the same time, and most people haven’t connected them yet.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said it plainly on a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast: coding is practically solved. Not just for engineers — for everyone. The title “software engineer” is going to start going away, he said. It’ll be replaced by “builder.”

I’m not a developer. I don’t write code for a living. But with Claude Code, I built and deployed a working AI chatbot in a day. Not a prototype. A production chatbot that’s live on a client’s site right now, handling real conversations. The gap between “I have an idea” and “it’s live on the internet” collapsed from weeks to hours.

Not a website builder. Not a hosting company. A deployment platform that takes whatever you build — a site, an app, an agent — and puts it on the internet with global performance, automatic scaling, and zero server management. For $20/month. Unlimited sites.

Read that again. Squarespace charges $16–33 per site per month. Vercel charges $20/month total. Three sites, ten sites, twenty sites — same price. The economics are absurd.

Who built this thing

The founder story matters because it explains the design philosophy.

Guillermo Rauch grew up in a working-class area outside Buenos Aires. Didn’t finish school. Started working in Switzerland at 17. Taught himself to code as a teenager. His first company, Cloudup, was acquired by Automattic — the company behind WordPress. He literally worked inside the WordPress machine before deciding to build something fundamentally different.

That’s not a random pivot. That’s someone who saw the limits of the old model from the inside and said “I can do better.”

Today Vercel is valued at $9.3 billion. Their annual revenue doubled to $200 million in 15 months. Netflix, Nike, Walmart, Uber, Starbucks — they all deploy on Vercel. Even Anthropic (the company behind Claude) builds their frontend on Next.js, Vercel’s open-source framework.

“Our founding insight in 2015 was simple — the world’s largest companies had internal infrastructure that let them build and ship fast. The rest of the world didn’t have access to that.”

— Guillermo Rauch, CEO, Vercel

The AI Cloud play

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building with AI — which, whether you know it or not, includes you.

Vercel spent a decade building the best frontend deployment platform in the world. That was the “Frontend Cloud.” Now they’re building the AI Cloud: purpose-built infrastructure for applications that think, respond, and act.

“Don’t worry about not knowing these technical concepts yet. Tools like Claude Code don’t just write the code for you — they explain everything while they do it. You don’t have to know what a CDN or serverless function is anymore. But if you want to — like I do — it’s just one question away.”

— Danny Holtschke

See it in action: v0

Before I moved to Claude Code, I started with v0 — Vercel’s AI-powered app builder. It’s the fastest way to understand what I mean by “coding is solved.”

You describe what you want in plain English. v0 generates a working app — UI, logic, database, the works. You can click on any element and adjust it visually with a built-in design editor. Then deploy it to a live URL with one click.

I’ve since moved to Claude Code via VS Code for deeper builds. The reason is depth — v0 is great for getting started, Claude Code is better for building exactly what you need with full control. But both deploy to the same platform. Vercel doesn’t care how you build. It cares that what you build runs fast, scales automatically, and costs almost nothing.

“A solo operator in Auckland can now have the same deployment infrastructure, agent capabilities, and scaling power as a team of 50 engineers at a funded startup.”

The real disruption

The disruption isn’t “anyone can make a website.” Squarespace already proved that. The disruption is: anyone can build and deploy intelligent, custom applications at enterprise scale.

The same global CDN — meaning your site loads fast for a visitor in Auckland and a visitor in New York, because copies live on servers all around the world. The same serverless functions — meaning code that runs only when needed, without you managing any servers. The same AI Gateway — meaning access to hundreds of AI models through a single connection.

I’m betting on Vercel because I’ve seen what happens when you combine agentic coding tools with world-class infrastructure. You stop adapting your business to fit someone else’s template. You start building exactly what your business needs.

And you own every line of it.

What I’d tell someone considering the switch

Running your business on someone else's template?

I build custom sites, chatbots, and business tools on Vercel — owned by you, not rented.