By Q2 2026, Vercel’s standard Next.js 15 hosting tier will cost startups an average of $0.08 per GB of bandwidth and $0.12 per serverless function execution—40% more than Cloudflare Pages’ $0.05/GB and $0.07/execution pricing for identical workloads. For a startup serving 500k monthly active users (MAU) with 2TB monthly bandwidth and 10M function calls, that’s a $2,400 annual difference that compounds as you scale. For a Series A startup with 5M MAU, 20TB monthly bandwidth, and 100M function calls, the difference jumps to $24,000 per year—enough to hire a junior engineer for 6 months in most US markets. This cost gap isn’t a result of Vercel overpricing: it’s a structural difference between Vercel’s centralized Node.js runtime and Cloudflare’s distributed edge network, which passes savings from reduced data transfer and compute costs directly to users.…