Vercel is a platform for deploying web applications, closely tied to the Next.js framework. For a launch, it turns a code repository into a live site, with a separate preview for each change.
How founders use it
A developer connects a repository, pushes code and gets a published site with an address for each version, which makes it easy to share a draft with testers before launch day. Vercel also provides serverless functions and AI tools, including v0, which generates web interfaces from prompts, and an AI SDK for chat interfaces. See Minimum viable product.
What to weigh
Hosting is simple for front end projects, but back end services and databases usually come from another provider. Company history is in Vercel.
Alternatives
Netlify for a similar workflow, Railway for servers and databases, and Supabase for a back end behind a Vercel front end.
Related entries
See Vercel, Netlify, Railway and Supabase.
Vercel is part of Tools and stack.
Sources
Wikipedia entry for Vercel. Reviewed October 2026.
