BUT CAN'T VERCEL DO THAT?
Alfredo vs Vercel
“Can't I just put everything on Vercel?”
Vercel rents you the deploy half. Alfredo self-hosts both halves, with the opposite trade-offs.
YOU KEEP
Any project you leave on Vercel. Nothing in Alfredo depends on it.
Alfredo and Vercel, across the seven things
The honest version, side by side. Green is automatic, amber is manual work you own, a grey ring is not possible.
| CAPABILITY | Alfredo | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on your servers | Any VPS you can SSH into. Alfredo runs on your servers. It does not host your projects. | No. The platform is not self-hostable, though Next.js itself is open source. |
| Deploys your projects | Built in. Pick the integrations a project needs and deploy. There is no separate PaaS underneath. | Yes. Frontend and serverless, with strong preview workflows. |
| Wires each project at birth | The core claim. Auth, email, database, analytics and payments are configured at creation, secrets are moved for you, and integrations already running are reused. | No. You connect marketplace add-ons per project yourself. |
| One dashboard across projects | One HQ across every project you deploy. | No. Only Vercel-hosted projects, on own-platform metrics. |
| Sees your business, not just CPU | Payments and email delivery sit next to traffic, errors and uptime. Those are business signals rather than CPU readings. | No. |
| Works without assembly | Zero setup. The cross-project view is assembled for you rather than built by you. | On the deploy side, yes. That is its strength. |
| Flat cost for many projects | Flat: you pay for your own box, not per host, per project or per module. | Pro $20/user/mo, 1 TB transfer, then from $0.15/GB across several meters (2026-07-18). Documented tail risk: the June 2024 Cara bill of $96,280 in one week. |
ALFREDO ADDS
Your own servers, a flat cost shape, integration wiring at creation, and one view across all projects. Alfredo is a prototype and has none of Vercel's operational track record.
VERCEL'S REAL WINS
Deploy polish, preview deployments, a generous hobby tier, reliability at scale.
STAY ON VERCEL IF
Stay put if you want zero servers and never want to think about ops. That is a reasonable want, and it is not Alfredo. Alfredo is an early, unproven prototype. Vercel is the mature, proven thing.