A practical comparison of cloud platforms for web applications - when to use each, real cost breakdowns, and deployment strategies.
Cloud platform selection is one of those decisions that's easy to get wrong and expensive to change. After deploying 50+ production applications across AWS, GCP, and Vercel, here's our practical framework for choosing the right platform.
Vercel: Best for Next.js
Zero-config deployment, automatic preview environments, global edge network, and seamless integration with the framework make Vercel unbeatable for developer experience. For teams shipping Next.js apps with moderate traffic (under 1M monthly visitors), Vercel's Pro plan ($20/month) is the best value in the market.
AWS: Maximum Flexibility
AWS wins when you need infrastructure flexibility - custom VPCs, specific compute configurations, managed databases (RDS, DynamoDB), message queues (SQS), and serverless functions (Lambda). The trade-off is complexity: you'll need DevOps expertise to manage IAM, networking, monitoring, and cost optimization.
GCP: Best for Data & AI
GCP is our choice for data-heavy and ML-intensive applications. BigQuery for analytics, Vertex AI for model training, Cloud Run for containerized services - Google's data and AI tooling is best-in-class. Firebase also provides an excellent developer experience for mobile app backends.
Our Recommended Stack
Vercel for frontend deployment + AWS for backend services (RDS, S3, Lambda, SES). This hybrid approach gives you the best developer experience for the frontend and the most flexibility for backend infrastructure. We manage this architecture for 30+ production applications at Fenebris.
