Paul Pietzko

Vercel’s ecosystem is a love-hate relationship. It’s pretty damn neat. You use NextJS (the biggest web framework today), with TurboPack for some crazy performance, and with one command in a terminal, deploy everything live.

With the @vercel/analytics and @vercel/insights tags, tracking web analytics as well as speed insights is nicely integrated into the entire stack, making it a breeze to launch your next project fast and keep track of your users.

But here comes the catch: Vercel hosting becomes really expensive the more you grow. Of course, for most of us solo devs or small startups, these limits are far more than one of us could ever reach. Don’t get me wrong — I love Vercel for its simplicity, and I have great respect for the innovative dedication the Vercel team puts in every day to transform the web of tomorrow. But even so, you’re still hooked to Vercel’s platform and can’t really escape it.

I host all kinds of websites on Vercel — not only NextJS, but also Angular, Astro — heck, even plain Webpack projects at some point. And for these cases, I really wished that I could use the same analytic tools Vercel provides for NextJS. But no, I can’t.

In a spontaneous midnight endeavour this year in January, I decided to try something new. There are countless one-night projects — I call them that. We all have these. You stay awake till 3–4 am and want to change your whole life from now on and dedicate every living minute to living a “productive” life. Only to wake up th

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