[davidlumley]

I'm the person who originally set Cara up on Vercel in late 2022, before I stepped away to focus on my own startup.

I chose Vercel for a few reasons:

1. When you have 0 users, worrying about scale is a huge time sink. I wanted the team to be able to focus on building a product people wanted, acquiring users, and retaining them.

2. Vercel's preview branches make it lovely to preview work in progress, and QA pull requests. This is critical given Cara was and still is a small team of volunteers.

3. NextJS is lovely to work with, and choosing something both popular and with a JS/TS base made it easy to onboard new volunteers.

If I was doing things again, I'd still choose Vercel. The only difference is I'd enable spend management for their team (a feature Vercel released in late 2023: https://vercel.com/docs/pricing/spend-management).