serverless

Vercel focuses primarily on frontend deployment, providing limited support for databases and backend services. Developers cannot create sophisticated full-stack applications without using external services, adding complexity and additional costs that create architectural constraints.

Serverless cold starts are a major performance pain point on Vercel. Documentation suggests using Edge, but Edge functions don't support Node.js APIs, making them impractical for most use cases, and support for cold start mitigation is severely lacking.