Replacing Vercel Blob with a cloud storage solution
Vercel Blob is a fully managed, global file storage service that allows you to upload and serve files through a global network through unique and unguessable URLs. It is designed for the evolution of JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks, and it provides an intuitive, promise-based API.
Vercel Blob features
Global file storage: Vercel Blob stores your files on a global network, so they can be accessed from anywhere in the world with low latency.
Unique and secure URLs: Vercel Blob URLs are unique and hard to guess, which helps to protect your files from unauthorized access.
Immutable URLs: Vercel Blob URLs are immutable, which means that they cannot be changed once they are created. This helps to ensure that your files are always accessible.
Low latency, high throughput: Vercel Blob is designed for low latency and high throughput, so you can be sure that your files will be served quickly and reliably.
No setup required: Vercel Blob is a fully managed service, so you don't need to worry about setting up or managing any infrastructure.
Built to scale: Vercel Blob is built to scale to meet the needs of your application, so you can be sure that it will be able to handle even the most demanding workloads.
Vercel Blob Pricing
Vercel Blob is currently available in early access. The pricing for Vercel Blob is as follows:
Hobby: Vercel Blob is free for Hobby users within the usage limits. Vercel will send you emails as you are nearing your usage limits. You will not pay for any additional usage.
Professional: 100 GB of storage and 1 GB of egress per month, billed at $0.005 per GB for additional storage and $0.15 per GB for additional egress.
Enterprise: Custom pricing available.
The usage limits for the Hobby plan are as follows:
10 GB of storage
100 MB of egress per day
The egress limits are applied per month. For example, if you exceed the 100 MB of egress per day limit on the 15th of the month, you will be charged for the entire month's egress.
The pricing for Vercel Blob is very competitive. For example, Google Cloud Storage costs $0.004 per GB for storage and $0.02 per GB for egress. Amazon S3 costs $0.005 per GB for storage and $0.09 per GB for egress.
If you are looking for a reliable and scalable file storage solution for your web application, Vercel Blob is a great option to consider. It is easy to use, secure, and has a very competitive pricing.
Why not use Vercel Blob?
Vercel is a great company with a very good track record. However, developers like me often would caution against using proprietary technologies for such basic things unless there are some clear benefits.
Storing blobs in the cloud is one of the earliest cloud services. It is an extremely mature technology. While Vercel Blob is competitive price-wise, if you are already an Amazon AWS or Google Cloud customer, why bother with this new service instead of using your cloud account?
If you rely too much on Vercel for even basic solutions chances are you will get locked into their ecosystem for good. Over time even if the blob prices remain low, other aspects of Vercel might get expensive for you but blob storage might prevent you from moving away from Vercel.
Hence I think it is safer to build your software in a way that is more robust and you should be able to switch providers just very easily.
How simple it is to use cloud storage instead?
It is ridiculously simple! Many tutorials on the internet can teach you how to replace Vercel blob storage API with an equivalent API for Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3.
You might have to spend some time creating a new bucket, storage path and credentials setup in your NextJS app, but it is a time and effort that gives you long-term flexibility.