How Vercel Turned Shipping Into Its Brand

Developer-tool companies have a weird problem. The products that often earn them the most attention are the ones they give away. A framework, SDK, or open standard can reach millions of people before its creator earns a dollar from it. Adoption depends on developers trusting that the project will remain useful and responsive to the community. And after they succeed, the company must figure out how to make money. Vercel and Netlify show two ways to solve this problem. They entered the same market at nearly the same time with very similar products. Netlify was founded in 2014 and launched from private beta in March 2015. Guillermo Rauch started ZEIT, which would become Vercel, in November 2015 and released its first product in April 2016. I use both for my projects. Mostly Vercel these days, though this blog is hosted on Netlify. Both made it easy to connect a repository, preview changes, and publish globally. For years, Netlify was bigger. The 2022 Web Almanac still detected Netlify on…