The conventional wisdom says Vercel is expensive once you are at scale and you should self-host. I tested it. Six months on Hetzner, then back to Vercel. The accounting was not what I expected.
Direct cost
Source: Receipts, Q4 2025 to Q1 2026
The infrastructure line items are cheaper self-hosted, no question. £18 for a Hetzner CCX13 versus £35 in Vercel compute[1][2]. Bandwidth is effectively free at Hetzner. Database is on the same box, no separate bill.
The line item that broke the case for me was the bottom one. £400/month of my time, conservative at £40/hour for ten hours per month. That includes weekly patches, debugging the one thing that broke each month, tuning Postgres because it ate too much RAM, and the Sunday afternoon I lost to a Caddy config bug.
Uptime
Source: Better Stack uptime monitor
Vercel hits 99.99% reliably. My self-hosted setup averaged 99.81%. That sounds close. It is not. 99.99% is 4 minutes downtime a month, 99.81% is 82 minutes. The January 99.45% number was an outage caused by my own deploy script when a release with a bad migration brought down the API for two hours while I was watching a film.
If anyone else relied on the service this would be unacceptable. Because it was a side project I lived with it.
Operational reality
| Spec | Vercel | Self-hosted (Hetzner + Caddy) |
|---|---|---|
| Deploys | git push | CI + scp + systemctl reload |
| Rollback | One click | Re-run CI on previous SHA |
| Preview URLs | Per PR | You build it |
| TLS | Auto | Caddy auto |
| Image optimisation | Built-in | Self-host or skip |
| Edge cache invalidation | Auto | Manual |
| Logs | Built-in 24h+ | You set up Loki/Grafana |
| On-call | Vercel handles infra | You |
| Outage debugging | Status page | You SSH in |
Self-hosting is rewarding when you are learning. The trade is concrete: you save infrastructure cost, you spend operational time. If the project is your main income, that operational time is the most expensive thing you have. If the project is your hobby, the time is what you wanted to spend anyway.
When self-hosting wins
- Workloads that are bandwidth-heavy (media servers, file proxies). Hetzner egress is essentially free; Vercel charges meaningfully.
- Workloads with predictable, steady CPU usage. A box you pay for every hour beats Vercel's per-execution pricing once utilisation is high.
- Side projects you actively want to operate.
When Vercel wins
- Anything where your time is the bottleneck.
- Apps with low average traffic and occasional spikes.
- Teams of one to three engineers.
Where I landed
I migrated back to Vercel for the projects I work on. I keep one Hetzner box for things that are bandwidth-heavy or where I want to play with the system. The rest live on Vercel because the time savings exceed the infrastructure savings.
The honest cost of self-hosting is not the £18 a month. It is the Sunday afternoons.
About the data
A note on what the numbers in this post represent so you can read them with the right confidence:
- "My own bench" rows are personal measurements on my own hardware. They are honest about my setup and reproducible there, but they should not be treated as universal benchmark scores.
- Benchmark numbers attributed to public sources (Geekbench Browser, DXOMARK, NotebookCheck, FIA timing) are illustrative — the trend is what matters, not the third decimal place. Cross-check against the source for anything you would act on financially.
- Client outcomes and ROI percentages in business-focused posts are anonymised composites drawn from my own consulting work. Real numbers, real direction, sanitised so individual clients are not identifiable.
- Foldable crease-depth and similar engineering measurements are estimates pulled from teardown reports and reviewer claims; manufacturers do not publish these directly.
- Forecasts and "what I bet" lines are exactly that — opinions, not predictions with a track record yet.
If you spot a number that contradicts a source you trust, tell me — I would rather correct it than be the chart that was off by 6 percent and pretended otherwise.