[cweld510]

It makes sense from a financial perspective for a small company that’s trying to grow. The most precious resource at such a company is engineering time. It’s very limited - you only have X number of engineers, it’s hard to hire good engineers, and they’ll only work so much. Engineers create the thing that makes money and they are in the critical path for nearly every single product experiment that a growing startup needs to perform to figure out its PMF. So nearly all of the small startup’s engineering time should be spent on things that differentiate its product, not stuff like serving frontend code, which is a solved problem. Traditional VC-funded startup economics assumes exponential growth after PMF, which means that engineering work required to reach PMF has potentially compounding returns.

Engineers know this too, which is why they choose Vercel over rolling their own infra. Frontend engineers get paid for building nice UXs that people will pay for, not mechanically implementing routing policies. So they’ll outsource that work to Vercel. It’s similar for backend engineers. What compounds this effect is that, at a small startup, you are on call in perpetuity. So you need to aggressively farm out support work for nonessential systems to service providers or else you risk being overwhelmed.