Vercel is a cloud platform for deploying web applications and AI agents. Developers import a repository and get automatic CI/CD, a global CDN, Fluid compute that bills for actual execution time, a Web Application Firewall and DDoS mitigation. Newer products include an AI SDK, an AI Gateway for model access, Sandbox environments and Workflows for durable orchestration. A free Hobby plan covers personal projects, Pro costs $20 per month with $20 of usage credit included, and Enterprise is custom.
Frontend and full-stack developers, especially those working with Next.js, are the natural users, along with startups that want to ship without managing servers. Agencies and product teams use preview URLs and team collaboration to review changes, while platform builders rely on tenant isolation, domain management and custom SSL certificates to serve many customers. Larger companies look to Enterprise for SCIM, directory sync, managed firewall rulesets and a 99.99% SLA.
Common scenarios include launching a marketing site or documentation hub that scales from zero to millions of visits, deploying AI features that call models through the gateway, and running agent workloads in sandboxed environments. Customer examples cited include Notion handling millions of agent conversations daily, Zapier serving over 100 million monthly visits, and Mintlify hosting documentation for more than 20,000 companies. Spend management lets a team set limits and alerts that stop usage before a budget is exceeded, and observability shows traffic and performance. Pro also offers a free trial, and a Vercel plugin and CLI let developers deploy straight from the terminal or from their coding agents.
