I Wasted 2 Years Managing Infra. Then I Found Vercel.

#nextjs #vercel #webdev

In 2023, I quit my full-time job to chase entrepreneurship. Not the glamorized Twitter-thread version—this was real, raw, and funded by small contracts to stay afloat, and the small cash-flows a saas in beta version would provide.

Before that, I spent three years climbing the professional ladder… only to realize there’s no ladder. Not for everyone, anyway. Just elevators for the well-connected.

I became a senior software engineer and later a lead at small startup. Then I joined a health-tech company doing government contracts. That role? It drained me. The bureaucracy, the stagnation—I burned out so hard I swore off full-time jobs for good.

For a while, I was Spider-Man—slinging my web across every task imaginable: infrastructure, frontend, backend, security testing, even marketing and CEO office work. My burnout wasn’t sudden. It was slow and surgical. Three months before I left, I was contributing to every development team in the company. And they still didn’t bother with the performance evaluation they promised—probably to dodge a 50% raise we discussed.

Then came my leap into entrepreneurship. I had the confidence of a lion. I was the technical founder everyone needed. Not just someone who builds things—but a chief who can cook and ship any complex software design efficiently and effectively.

For two years, I poured that energy and perspective into managing bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, designing interfaces, writing backend logic, deploying features… solo. I wore every hat. And eventually, that hats got too heavy.

That’s when I did something radical:
I decided to skill-down.

I walked away from the full-stack, DevOps-heavy MERN setup and chose Next.js and Vercel—for both my startups and contract gigs.

And you know what? It felt like breathing after drowning.

The moment I refactored my entire SaaS onto NextJS, Vercel, MongoDB Atlas, other managed services, and some low-maintenance solutions deployed on vps'es , and got the landing page live, the relief was indescribable. I knew I still had a mountain of work ahead—but the weight was gone already. No more Kubernetes. No more managing database clusters, worrying about CI/CD, TLS, VPCs, ingress controllers, IAM roles, firewalls… the whole DevOps circus.

Now, I can confidently say:
Vercel + Next.js isn’t a luxury—it’s a pain-killer.

In fact, I’m currently migrating two more SaaS products to Next.js and rebuilding my internal SaaS factory using this stack. Once that’s done, I’ll reclaim 3-5 hours daily that I used to waste wrangling cloud infrastructure.

Some weekends? Gone entirely to fixing infra issues. Never again.