Vercel and v0: What They Do, and Why AWS Still Matters

Someone asked me last week what Vercel actually is. Not "what is it used for" — they wanted to know what it can do, what it can't do, and why I keep gluing AWS onto the side of it. I have shipped more than a dozen small apps this year, almost all of them on Vercel. So I sat down and answered properly. This post is that answer, written simply enough that you don't need to already know what "serverless" means.

What Vercel Actually Does

Vercel is a place to put your website's code so the whole world can visit it. You write your app (most of my apps use a framework called Next.js), push it to GitHub, and Vercel builds it and puts it online. No server to buy, no server to update at 2am.

The part people miss is that Vercel also runs small pieces of backend code for you. These are called Functions. When your app needs to call an AI model or check a database, that code runs inside a Vercel Function instead of a server you manage. You pay for the seconds it actually runs, not for a machine sitting idle all day.

Where Vercel Shines

The single biggest strength is speed of iteration. Every time you push code, Vercel gives you a brand new URL for that exact change, before it ever touches your live site. I use this constantly — I can send a teammate a working link instead of a screenshot.

Vercel also happens to be built by the same people who make Next.js, so new framework features tend to work there first and work well. Add a global content delivery network that spreads your site across the world automatically, and a 2026 billing change called Fluid Compute that stops charging you while your code is just waiting on a database or an AI response, and you get a platform that mostly gets out of your way.

Where Vercel Runs Out of Road

Vercel is built around the idea that code runs for a short burst and then stops. That is great for a webpage, and bad for anything that needs to stay running, like a live video call server. WebSockets (a way to keep a connection open between browser and server) got official support in 2026, but even Vercel's own docs admit it's limited — a connection gets cut off once the function's time limit is reached.

The other wall I keep hitting is native software. Tools like Chromium (for turning a page into a screenshot) or LibreOffice (for converting files) are heavy programs that don't fit comfortably inside a Vercel Function. Every time I've needed one of those, I ended up moving that one piece to AWS instead. More on that below.

One more honest note: Vercel used to sell its own database products. It shut those down and now just connects you to other companies' databases through a marketplace. That's fine, but it means "database" is no longer something Vercel does itself.

Why AWS Is Still Half My Stack

This is the part that surprises people. I don't see Vercel and AWS as competitors. In almost every app I've built this year, Vercel handles the website and the light stuff, and AWS quietly does the heavy lifting behind it.

A concrete example: my comment overlay tool (code) lets you drop scrolling comments onto a slide deck, like the comment style you see on Japanese video sites. Making that image requires Chromium and LibreOffice running together, which is too heavy for a Vercel Function. So the website lives on Vercel, but the actual image gets built by an AWS Lambda container in Tokyo, and the finished file sits in an S3 bucket for 24 hours before it deletes itself. My slide generator (code) uses the exact same trick.

For AI features, I lean on Amazon Bedrock, which is Amazon's service for calling AI models like Claude. My debate simulator (code) and my misleading-post checker (code) both run their AI logic through something called AgentCore Runtime, which is AWS's newer way of hosting an AI agent so it can keep its own memory instead of forgetting everything between messages. My Minecraft bot (code) does the same, sitting next to a small EC2 server that actually runs the game.

Connecting Vercel to AWS used to mean copying an AWS password into Vercel's settings, which always felt risky. Since I switched to something called OIDC Federation, Vercel and AWS just trust each other directly, so no password ever gets typed in or stored. That one change made me far more comfortable wiring the two together.

Even my wallet-controlling agent (code), which asks a human to approve or reject purchases before an AI can spend money, follows the same pattern: approval screen on Vercel, the actual agent and its memory living in AWS. And my quantum fortune app (code) reads real quantum randomness from Amazon Braket, which nothing in Vercel could ever do on its own.

So the honest strength-and-weakness list looks like this: Vercel is excellent at "get this in front of a browser, fast." AWS is what I reach for whenever the work needs to run long, run heavy, or touch something specialized like a quantum computer. Neither one replaces the other.

What Is v0

v0 is Vercel's AI tool that writes frontend code for you. You describe a screen, or upload a screenshot, and it generates working React components you can drop straight into a Next.js app. It got a big upgrade in early 2026 — it can now connect to a real database, run your code in a live sandbox before you even copy it out, and push straight to GitHub.

It's genuinely good at the boring-but-necessary screens: forms, dashboards, chat windows, pricing cards. It is not a replacement for your actual backend logic. It writes the shirt, not the person wearing it.

Which of My Own Projects Could Have Used v0

Looking back honestly, a few of my apps are mostly "describe input, show AI result" screens — exactly what v0 is built for. My portfolio site (code) is a plain personal page, the kind of thing v0 could sketch out in one prompt. The approval-card screen in my wallet agent, and the input-and-score layout in my AI text checker (code), are also fairly standard patterns I probably didn't need to hand-build from scratch.

Other projects wouldn't have benefited much. The comment overlay tool lives or dies on a custom canvas animation, not a form. My diagram generator (code) is really a rendering engine wearing a UI. No AI page generator writes that part for you — you still have to build the thing that actually does the work.

Wrapping Up

If I had to compress this whole post into one sentence: Vercel and v0 make the front door fast and cheap to build, and AWS is still what I trust for anything that has to run long, run heavy, or touch real infrastructure. That split has held up across a dozen different apps now, so I don't expect it to change any time soon.