AWS is a set of primitives priced individually. EC2 on-demand Linux instances in us-east-1 run $0.0084 per hour for t4g.micro, $0.0104 for t3.micro and $0.0116 for t2.micro, billed per second, and behind them sit managed Postgres, object storage, function runtimes, load balancers and identity across a portfolio the company puts at more than 240 services. Thirty-plus services stay free within monthly usage limits and new accounts get up to $200 in credits. Every one of those services is metered, so the bill reflects the shape of the system you built rather than a tier you selected.
TL;DR
AWS hands you infrastructure: t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr and t3.micro at $0.0104/hr in us-east-1, per-second billing, 240-plus services including managed databases, storage and identity, 30-plus of them free within monthly limits. Vercel hands you a deployment pipeline: Hobby at $0 with 1 million CDN requests and 100GB of transfer a month, Pro at $20/mo with 10 million requests and 1TB included, Enterprise quoted. Vercel is the better home for a front end with serverless functions behind it; AWS is where you go when the application needs a real server, a private network or a database you administer.
Vercel inverts that. The Hobby plan is free and includes a million CDN requests and 100GB of data transfer per month, three custom firewall rules, HTTPS certificates and the global delivery network, aimed at personal projects. Pro is $20 per month and raises the allowances to 10 million CDN requests (then from $2 per million) and 1TB of transfer (then from $0.15 per GB), with 40 custom firewall rules, 100 IP blocks and rate limiting starting at $0.50 per million allowed requests. Enterprise is sold through sales and adds custom allowances, up to a thousand firewall rules and contractual SLAs. BotID deep analysis on Pro bills $1 per thousand checks.
The two are not competitors so much as different layers that happen to both end in a URL. Vercel owns the front half — repository to CDN, with functions running near the user — while AWS owns whatever the functions call. Teams routinely deploy the interface to Vercel and keep the API, workers and database on AWS, which is usually cheaper and more honest than pretending one platform covers both.
| Feature | AWS | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | t4g.micro $0.0084/hr (2 vCPU, 1 GiB, us-east-1 Linux) | Hobby $0/mo: 1M CDN requests, 100GB transfer |
| Team tier | t3.micro $0.0104/hr; every add-on metered separately | Pro $20/mo: 10M CDN requests, 1TB transfer included |
| Beyond allowance | Depends on the service used; each has its own meter | CDN requests from $2 per million; transfer from $0.15 per GB |
| Web firewall | Security group and WAF configured per resource | 3 custom rules on Hobby, 40 on Pro, 1,000 on Enterprise |
| Rate limiting | Provided by services you add and pay for separately | 1M allowed requests included on Hobby, from $0.50 per million on Pro |
| Deployment | Pipeline, previews and rollback built by your team | Preview deployments and rollbacks included with the plan |
| Top tier | Enterprise agreements negotiated through sales | Enterprise with custom allowances, SLAs and 1,000 firewall rules |
Pick AWS if
If the system runs workers, holds state, needs private networking or must sit in a particular region, AWS is the platform that will still fit in three years. The per-second entry price is trivial — t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr — and the discipline you need is forecasting the supporting services rather than the instance.
Pick Vercel if
For a front end, a documentation site, a store front or an app whose logic lives in functions, Vercel removes the parts of AWS nobody enjoys: build infrastructure, CDN configuration and certificate management. Hobby covers a million requests at $0, and $20/mo on Pro covers ten million, which is real traffic for most products.
No independent reviews, ratings or user quotes were collected for this page, so none appear above. Every figure and claim comes from the vendors' own pricing and product pages as retrieved for this article.
Only for the front half of a product. Vercel hosts front ends and functions; it does not rent virtual machines or administer a relational database for you, so the API and data layer still need a home.
Pro is $20 per month and includes 10 million CDN requests and 1TB of data transfer. Beyond that, requests bill from $2 per million and transfer from $0.15 per GB, both shown on the pricing page before you upgrade.
The compute itself is cheap — t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr in us-east-1 on Linux — but a usable setup adds a database, storage, data transfer and possibly a load balancer, each metered separately. Compare that total against Vercel's flat $20 rather than against the instance rate.
Yes, and it is common: the front end deploys to Vercel while the API and data live in AWS. The two connect over HTTPS exactly as they would to any other host.
Vercel includes three custom firewall rules on Hobby and forty on Pro, with 100 IP blocks on Pro and up to a thousand rules on Enterprise. On AWS the equivalent protection is a security group plus a WAF configured and paid for per resource.
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