AWS Amplify vs Vercel: Which One Should an AWS User Pick?

Last time I wrote about why I still pair Vercel with AWS behind the scenes, even though Vercel handles the website itself. A few people asked a follow-up question: why not just skip the seam entirely and let AWS host the frontend too, with Amplify? Fair question. So I put Amplify and Vercel side by side and looked at them the way an AWS user actually would — not "which one is more popular," but "which one fits the account I already have."

What AWS Amplify Actually Does

Amplify is AWS's own answer to "I want to build and host a website, plus the backend behind it, without stitching ten services together myself." You describe what you need — a login system, a database, file storage — and Amplify wires up real AWS services for you: Cognito for login, DynamoDB for the database, S3 for files, all controlled through one command line tool.

The idea is that you never leave AWS. Your website, your database, and your AI features all sit in the same account, under the same permissions system, on the same bill.

What Vercel Actually Does (Quick Recap)

Vercel is narrower on purpose. It hosts your frontend, fast, with a preview link for every single change you push. It runs small pieces of backend code called Functions, but it was never trying to be your database or your login system. For everything past "run this code and show this page," you connect out to something else — usually AWS, in my case.

Amplify's Strengths, From an AWS User's Seat

If you already live in AWS, Amplify keeps that true in a very literal sense. One account, one IAM setup, one bill, one support plan. There's no second company to trust with a role that can touch your infrastructure, because there's no second company involved at all.

The pricing shape also fits AWS habits better. Amplify charges for what you actually use across Lambda, CloudFront, and S3, the same pay-as-you-go logic as the rest of AWS. There's no per-developer seat fee, so a five-person team doesn't pay five times for the same website. And because Amplify is just AWS underneath, reaching for SageMaker, MediaConvert, or IoT services later is a normal next step, not a new integration project.

Amplify's Weaknesses

The honest downside is friction. Getting a first project live on Amplify takes real setup — IAM roles, build settings, sometimes a support ticket's worth of confusion — where other platforms get you to a working URL in minutes. If your app leans hard on Next.js features like ISR or middleware, Amplify's support for them exists but needs more manual configuration than Vercel's, where those features are native. Amplify is also simply a smaller product team than Vercel's, so newer framework features tend to land there later.

Vercel's Strengths, From an AWS User's Seat

Vercel's whole product is speed of iteration, and it shows. Push code, get a preview URL, done. If your team already ships fast and just needs AWS for the heavier backend pieces, Vercel plus AWS behind it (the pattern from my last post) gets you both: a frontend experience nothing else quite matches, and full AWS underneath for everything that actually needs it.

Vercel's Weaknesses

From an AWS user's seat, the honest cost is a second vendor relationship and a second bill. You're now trusting Vercel with a role into your AWS account (OIDC federation makes that reasonably safe, but it's still a seam that Amplify simply doesn't have). Pricing is also seat-based — a few hundred dollars a year for a small team is nothing, but bandwidth overage fees can turn a cheap plan into a surprising one if a project suddenly gets popular.

Where the Math Flips

For a solo developer or a two-person team, Vercel is almost always cheaper and faster to start with — the hours you'd spend on IAM and CloudFront setup cost more than the subscription. Once a team grows past three to five engineers, or bandwidth becomes a real number instead of a rounding error, Amplify's pay-as-you-go model usually starts winning on pure cost. Team size and bandwidth are the two numbers worth actually checking before picking either one.

Other Options Worth Knowing About

Amplify and Vercel aren't the only two doors here. Netlify plays in the same space as Vercel — similar preview-link workflow, its own edge functions, sometimes cheaper depending on your traffic shape. Cloudflare Pages has the most generous free tier of the bunch, with unlimited bandwidth on its free plan, which matters if you're hosting something that might suddenly get a lot of traffic. And if what you actually need is a full backend rather than just a frontend, Railway and Render bundle a managed database and background jobs in a way neither Amplify nor Vercel really tries to.

So Which One Would I Pick

If the team is already deep in AWS and wants everything under one roof, Amplify is the more honest choice, even with the rougher setup. If the team's whole identity is "we ship fast," Vercel wins that part outright, and AWS just becomes the quiet infrastructure behind it, the way it already is in most of my own projects. Neither one is wrong. They're just optimized for a different question: do you want one vendor, or the fastest possible frontend, with everything else adapted to fit around that choice.