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 (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 — marketplace add-ons are connected per project by you. |
| One dashboard across projects | One HQ across every project you deploy. | No — only Vercel-hosted projects, own-platform metrics. |
| Sees your business, not just CPU | Payments and email delivery sit next to traffic, errors and uptime — business signals, not just CPU. | No. |
| Works without assembly | Zero setup — the cross-project view is assembled for you, not built. | 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.