What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month?
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?
show comments
Anonyneko
Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
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.
show comments
acejam
450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000
450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
show comments
heipei
The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.
Did I get something wrong?
show comments
an0malous
Isn't Jmail a static site? How could the bill be $47k?
show comments
ftchd
creator of Rev (Vercel Mobile) here
you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets)
Boo is the only think i can imagine when I hear about Vercel
ryanjshaw
How does this work from an accounting perspective? They write off a bad debt, but the actual loss is likely multiple orders of magnitude less. Do they only get to write off up to the actuals?
show comments
aaviator42
I'm not the first to point this out but the website in question, which is mostly static, could easily be hosted on a VPS for at most a couple hundred dollars a month.
show comments
fusslo
I know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team?
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.
show comments
igneo676
Rather than linking to a threads post that is a screenshot of the x.com post with little to no commentary, we should be linking to the original x.com post
What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $150 a month?
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.
sgammon
Would have been much cheaper in the first case on Cloudflare
opengrass
Or dump the EML for everyone to import into their own clients.
show comments
mdrzn
1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in.
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.
show comments
aurareturn
$46k for 470m page views.
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.
iamleppert
Insane to me a bill that large for what is effectively hosting static content. He could dump the entire thing on S3 and even with cloudfront it would be fraction of that.
in other words, "we know our product is overpriced as hell, so i will pay for it to avoid further exposure of our pricing model".
show comments
villgax
Garbage engineering begets garbage bills
sandworm101
Public files needing to be distributed to a huge population of interested persons? Sounds like the perfect situation for an oldschool torrent. That's how large data leaks were handled back in my day. 450TB is peanuts for perhaps ten thousand peers on fast residential connections.
hellogspot
It's common to hear rumors about SF CEOs and their NDAs with young (but legal) ladies. I hope there's no irony here, g.
What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month?
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?
Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
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.
450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000
450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.
Did I get something wrong?
Isn't Jmail a static site? How could the bill be $47k?
creator of Rev (Vercel Mobile) here
you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets)
https://github.com/revcel/revcel
Unreadable without an instagram/threads account
Boo is the only think i can imagine when I hear about Vercel
How does this work from an accounting perspective? They write off a bad debt, but the actual loss is likely multiple orders of magnitude less. Do they only get to write off up to the actuals?
I'm not the first to point this out but the website in question, which is mostly static, could easily be hosted on a VPS for at most a couple hundred dollars a month.
I know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team?
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.
Rather than linking to a threads post that is a screenshot of the x.com post with little to no commentary, we should be linking to the original x.com post
https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
threads.com wrapper for some reason. The actual origin post is on x.com: https://x.com/rtwlz/status/2020957597810254052
Guillermo reply: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
Is that good PR?
Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.
Recent and related:
Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600 - Dec 2025 (363 comments)
What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $150 a month?
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.
Would have been much cheaper in the first case on Cloudflare
Or dump the EML for everyone to import into their own clients.
1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in.
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.
$46k for 470m page views.
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.
Insane to me a bill that large for what is effectively hosting static content. He could dump the entire thing on S3 and even with cloudfront it would be fraction of that.
Source: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
(https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622)
It's a screenshot of this Twitter thread [1] for those who can't view Threads on mobile because it forces you to sign in.
[1] https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622
in other words, "we know our product is overpriced as hell, so i will pay for it to avoid further exposure of our pricing model".
Garbage engineering begets garbage bills
Public files needing to be distributed to a huge population of interested persons? Sounds like the perfect situation for an oldschool torrent. That's how large data leaks were handled back in my day. 450TB is peanuts for perhaps ten thousand peers on fast residential connections.
It's common to hear rumors about SF CEOs and their NDAs with young (but legal) ladies. I hope there's no irony here, g.