Infrastructure is no longer a neutral utility. As the Gaza death toll surpasses 70,000, the technical ease of Vercel has been eclipsed by its moral cost. The “managed monolith” has become a symbol of corporate complicity. We are entering the era of technological sovereignty, where choosing our stack is the first step in reclaiming our ethical autonomy.
The Ethics of Infrastructure
Beyond technical friction, the “Vercel Exodus” was catalyzed in late 2025 by CEO Guillermo Rauch's public meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss AI's role in statecraft. This association, occurring while the ICC sought warrants for Netanyahu, raised deep concerns about the potential co-option of web frameworks for military or surveillance purposes. For many, infrastructure is no longer neutral; choosing where to host has become an extension of one's ethical commitment to human rights and data sovereignty.
The Alternatives
Depending on your team's size and technical appetite, these are the primary landing spots for 2026:
- Managed PaaS (Railway / Render) The closest “Vercel feel” with more predictable, resource-based pricing rather than aggressive per-seat or bandwidth taxes.
- Edge-First (Cloudflare Pages) Unrivaled performance with zero egress fees. Note: This requires adapting code for the V8 Workers runtime rather than standard Node.js.
- Sovereign (Coolify / VPS) Self-hosted orchestration that lets you turn any $5/mo VPS into a private Vercel, offering absolute control and zero vendor lock-in.
The Migration Guide
1Enable Standalone Mode
The universal escape plan for Next.js is moving to a container-friendly build. In your next.config.js, set your output to standalone. This creates a minimal .next/standalone folder that includes a server.js, removing the need for Vercel's proprietary runtime.
/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const nextConfig = {
output: 'standalone',
}
module.exports = nextConfig2Replicate “Memory” (ISR & Images)
When leaving Vercel, you must choose how your app “remembers” generated data:
- For PaaS & VPS (Railway/Coolify) Since these environments are ephemeral, you must mount a Persistent Disk to
.next/cache. This ensures your ISR pages and images aren't wiped on every deploy. - For Edge (Cloudflare) You don't have a physical disk. Instead, you must offload image optimization to an external provider like Cloudinary or Cloudflare Images and use KV or R2 for caching.
3CI/CD & Preview Deployments
To replicate Vercel's “Preview” flow, use GitHub Actions. Tools like appleboy/ssh-action (for VPS) or the native Railway/Cloudflare CLI can build and deploy your app to unique subdomains for every pull request, ensuring your workflow remains modern and automated.