Vercel

There's something deeply unsettling about the way Vercel¹ presents itself—like a dinner party guest who keeps mentioning their Ferrari while asking to split the check—that made me spend approximately forty-seven minutes² trying to parse what exactly they're selling beyond the breathless incantation of "AI Cloud" repeated with the ritualistic fervor of a TED talk mantra. The homepage reads like it was written by someone who learned English exclusively from venture capital pitch decks, deploying phrases like "Framework-Defined Infrastructure" and "Fluid Compute" with the confident meaninglessness of a motivational poster translated through Google Translate seventeen times. It's the digital equivalent of that friend who uses "utilize" instead of "use" because they think it sounds more professional, except this friend is asking for your credit card number.

The visual design commits the cardinal sin³ of mistaking complexity for sophistication, layering gradients and geometric shapes with the restraint of a freshman design student who just discovered Photoshop's effects menu. Everything pulses and shimmers with that particular brand of Silicon Valley aestheticism that confuses "futuristic" with "good," resulting in a interface that feels like what someone in 1995 thought the year 2005 would look like⁴. The color palette—a medley of electric blues and neon gradients—screams "WE ARE DISRUPTING SOMETHING" so loudly that you almost miss the fact that they never quite explain what that something is, beyond vague promises of making your web experiences "faster" and "more personalized," which is basically the digital equivalent of promising your sandwich will be "more sandwich-like."

What truly galls me is the relentless deployment of what I can only describe as Enterprise Buzzword Bingo⁵: "zero-config infrastructure," "globally performant," "isolated environments"—terms that sound impressively technical while conveying approximately the same amount of concrete information as a horoscope. The copy reads like it was generated by feeding a large language model nothing but SaaS marketing materials and cryptocurrency whitepapers, then asking it to write a love letter to the concept of "scale." There's something profoundly dystopian about the phrase "execute complex workflows" being presented as a benefit rather than a warning, like advertising a restaurant by boasting about their "complicated digestion processes."

The pricing structure—or rather, the conspicuous absence of any meaningful pricing information⁶—embodies that particular tech-bro philosophy where transparency is treated like a character flaw and "contact sales" buttons multiply like digital hydras. This is the commercial equivalent of going to a restaurant where the menu just says "FOOD" and the waiter insists you'll love whatever they bring you while refusing to mention that it costs $847 per plate. The entire experience feels designed by people who genuinely believe that the phrase "streamline content creation & publishing" constitutes a compelling value proposition rather than the kind of generic corporate-speak that makes you question whether language itself has lost all meaning.

Perhaps most depressing is how Vercel represents the complete triumph of marketing-speak over genuine communication—a website that has successfully convinced itself that saying "Security, speed, and AI included" is somehow different from saying "our product works properly and also AI." It's the digital manifestation of late-stage capitalism's tendency to rebrand basic functionality as revolutionary innovation, like calling a hammer a "manual kinetic energy transfer solution" and charging enterprise rates. The whole thing reads like what would happen if you asked ChatGPT to design a parody of Silicon Valley excess, except the joke is on us because this is real and people are probably paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of "delivering more value to users by executing complex workflows."