Overview
Vercel is an American cloud platform company focused on frontend web development, deployment, and hosting. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its business centers on a hosted platform that developers use to deploy and run web applications and websites, and on Next.js, an open-source React framework that Vercel develops and maintains.
Vercel's work spans both commercial and open-source software. The commercial side is the hosting platform itself, while the open-source side is represented primarily by Next.js, which is freely available and widely used within the JavaScript and React ecosystem. This combination — a framework paired with a platform built to host applications written in it — is a defining characteristic of the company.
History
The company was founded in 2015 by Guillermo Rauch. It originally operated under the name ZEIT, and its early products and developer tooling were released under that branding. In 2020, the company was renamed Vercel, consolidating its products and public identity under a single name.
The rename coincided with the company's increasing association with Next.js, which had by then become a prominent framework in the React community. Documentation, tooling, and services previously published under the ZEIT name were subsequently presented as part of Vercel.
Products
Vercel's offerings fall into two main categories:
- Deployment and hosting platform — A cloud platform that lets developers deploy and host web applications and websites. It is aimed at frontend development workflows, handling the steps between a developer's source code and a running, publicly accessible site.
- Next.js — An open-source React framework developed and maintained by Vercel. It is one of the more widely adopted frameworks for building React-based web applications, and it is available independently of Vercel's hosted platform.
Because Vercel both maintains Next.js and operates a hosting platform, the two are frequently used together: applications built with the framework can be deployed to the company's platform, though the framework itself is not restricted to any single hosting provider.
Open Source
Next.js is Vercel's best-known open-source contribution. As an openly licensed project, it is used by developers and organizations independently of any commercial relationship with the company, and its development takes place in public. Maintaining a widely used framework alongside a paid platform places Vercel among the companies whose commercial products are closely tied to open-source software they help steward.
Further Reading
Additional information about the company, its platform, and its documentation is available on the official Vercel website.