Why I Stopped Using Vercel (And Built My Own Setup Instead)

Vercel is convenient. You connect your repository, click deploy or push, and most of the time it just works. That's exactly why I tried it in the first place. It promised speed, simplicity, and zero headaches.

But after a while, I realized that convenience comes at a cost. The logs are limited. When a build fails or when a request fails, you barely see what went wrong for a limited time. You can guess at errors, scroll through the interface, and hope you find the solution or the cause of the error. I wanted to see everything happening in real time. I wanted clarity at every step.

Beyond logs, configuring projects or changing settings requires too many clicks. Sometimes you have to dig through menus or multiple screens just to adjust something small. I wanted simple. I wanted one-click or at most a couple of clicks to do anything meaningful.

I started feeling like I was working around the platform instead of with it. Deployments were smooth when everything went perfectly, but as soon as something didn't, I was stuck navigating layers of abstraction. I was giving up visibility for convenience.

At some point, I realized I could solve this for myself. I wanted to fully control my environment, understand each deployment, and have instant access to logs, process states, and notifications without digging through a UI. I wanted snapshots that would automatically restore the last stable state if something went wrong. I wanted to know exactly who deployed what and when, and to see all the steps in a build or restart.

That's when I started building my own system. A setup where deployments are transparent, configuration is straightforward, and failures don't create panic. A setup where I can monitor my VPS, start or stop processes, redeploy, and always see what is happening at every stage.

It comes with a price. Managing your own infrastructure means more responsibility. You need to think about process monitoring, SSL certificates, Nginx configuration, and rollback strategies. But the payoff is control, clarity, and speed. Deployments no longer feel like guessing games. Every failure is actionable, every change visible, and every update predictable.

This experience taught me a lot about automation, process management, and what developers truly need in a deployment system. I didn't build this to replace Vercel or compete with it. I built it because I wanted to understand and take ownership of my stack.

In the next article, I will share how I turned this into a system I actually use for every project I deploy, what it does, and why it completely changed my workflow.

Next post: Building NGUIX: How I Turned My Deployment Needs Into a Complete System
(Coming soon - where I'll share how I built NGUIX, what it does, and why it completely changed my workflow.)