3 Ideas for Vercel and Next.js

Next.js has become one of my favorite tools for developing SaaS apps.

Vercel as well has conquered my heart as Heroku did several years ago.

This is a humble list of ideas that I’d love to see implemented. I’m sure Vercel’s leaders have already thought of this. But in any case I’d love to share my point of view:

Support Amazon Layers in API routes

Imagine being able to specify the following in your vercel.json config

{
   "api-routes": {
     "layers":[
         "ffmpeg"
     ]
   }
}

You could therefore in your API routes do image and video processing in a serverless manner. Infinitely scalable and super simple

Processing profile pictures, UGC and much more…

Why would it benefit Vercel?

Well first and foremost it would benefit its users

and secondly, ffmpeg invocations may take longer than 10 seconds which may drive many free users to upgrade to a paid plan.

Acquihire Outstatic as they did with TurboRepo

Some days ago, Rauch shared on twitter a link to Outstatic.

To put it simply, Outstatic uses the same Github Repo for your project as a CMS.

You can write blog posts in the same fashion as you do for WordPress and this gets stored in your Github Repo.

This is INSANELY useful.

At the moment, WordPress is still easier to set up for starting a blog than Next.js.

The reason for this is that you don’t need to mess setting up more than one thing.

To deploy a reasonable blog with Next.js you need to set up:

1. Vercel account
2. A github repo
3. An S3 bucket
4. or a CMS,
5. maybe an external database if you want to add a small app for marketing purposes, etc…

Personally, I like to minimize my dependencies on external services. So although there’s been a boom of CMS’s lately, I think it’d be hard to beat a good Github Integration.

BESIDES! Outstatic could be used for way more things than blogposts:

Outstatic could be extended to support Plugins a la WordPress

Imagine how rich a plugin ecosystem for Next.js could be.

You could one-click install a plugin from your Vercel dashboard that adds the JS equivalent of Woo-commerce.

Offer a simple database plan

Right now you can’t launch a SaaS app on Vercel alone.

You NEED to recur to a third party service like AWS, Heroku, Render or something that gives you a DB.

Once you do that, then you’ll need to solve the max connections problem that arises from Next.js API routes being deployed in a serverless manner, with each invocation spanning a new connection to the DB.

Vercel could offer a managed PostgreSQL service with connection management built in with PG Bouncer.

Solutions in this space like PlanetScale exist, but they force you to move from PostgreSQL to MySQL, and many may want to avoid that.

There’s this startup called Neon Tech. It seems promising, but it’s still in Beta.

Vercel could buy them for cheap now and throw some dev resources onto it.

In conclusion, the future looks bright for Vercel as they could be the next Heroku + Automattic.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.