The Vercel Alternative European Agencies Kept Asking Us to Build

For ten years, we've been running Templ, managed WordPress hosting for European web agencies. It's a good business. Our customers trust us with their clients' most important sites.

Late last year, conversations with our customers started to change. Agency after agency was asking the same thing: "Can you host our Next.js sites too?"

They were already using Vercel. The tech worked. They liked the developer experience. But the same three problems kept coming up in these conversations. Problems that were forcing them to have difficult discussions with their own clients.

The Bill That Started Everything

One conversation sticks with me. A Stockholm agency owner called me, frustrated. They'd been running a client's e-commerce site on Vercel, and the monthly bill had jumped from €95 to €780. In one month.

"I quoted my client €150 per month for hosting," he said. "How do I explain a €780 invoice?"

The culprit was a combination of things. Build time (their codebase was one big repo). Backend calls. Caching. Each line item looked reasonable on its own. Together, the total was hard to predict when they were quoting a fixed monthly price to a client.

This wasn't a one-off story. On Reddit, developers were sharing similar experiences:

"I've been paying $300+/mo on Vercel for what would cost me $80 on AWS directly. The DX is great but the markup is insane." — r/nextjs, Jan 2026 (source)

"I am CTO of a small startup... Last month the bill jumped from under $100 to over $800. This is for an application that is just hosting the front-end." — u/BaumerPT, r/nextjs, Jan 2026 (source)

One developer's story particularly resonated:

"I've been running 6 Next.js frontend projects on Vercel Pro... My bill this cycle? $602.21. 99.7% of my bill was build minutes. There were no alerts. No warnings. Just a bill." — Vercel Community, Feb 2026 (source)

Agencies usually bundle hosting into a monthly retainer. That only works if the underlying cost is predictable. When it isn't, it's not just an annoyance. It's a business risk.

Vercel has added spend management tools since then. Alerts, caps, auto-pause features. But they're opt-in, not defaults. And they don't address the root problem: complexity. When you have 9+ separate meters for builds, requests, caching, and bandwidth, predicting costs becomes work.

"But Where Is the Data Actually Stored?"

The second problem was becoming impossible to ignore. Every agency we talked to was hearing the same question from their clients: "Where is our data hosted?"

Five years ago, this was a niche compliance concern. Today? It's in every RFP (Request for Proposal), every procurement checklist, every contract negotiation. Especially in Europe.

Here's the reality: GDPR does not always require EU hosting. But EU hosting is often the simplest option in client conversations.

US providers can be subject to US jurisdictional access requests, even when data is hosted in Europe. For some clients, that legal exposure is enough to fail procurement, regardless of the technical setup. (source)

This creates uncertainty for some organizations assessing cross-border risk. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework survived its first legal challenge in September 2025, but it's under appeal. Previous frameworks were invalidated by European courts. (source)

For agencies, this isn't theoretical. Their clients, especially in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and the public sector, are increasingly demanding EU data residency as a hard requirement. Not because they're paranoid, but because it's the simplest way to avoid an entire category of legal risk.

The numbers tell the story. Traffic to european-alternatives.eu, a directory of European services, surged 1,100% in 2025. Worldwide sovereign cloud investment is projected to reach $80 billion in 2026, with European sovereign cloud alone accounting for $12.6 billion. Even AWS is building a European Sovereign Cloud with a €7.8 billion investment. The market has spoken. (source)

But here's the problem: for some agencies, it is hard to get a clean "EU only" answer from Vercel, Netlify, or Render. Even if a provider runs workloads in EU regions, procurement often still flags jurisdiction and subprocessor risk.

When that question turns into a cross-border legal review, the sales cycle slows down fast. Agencies end up doing compliance work they did not price into the project.

The €200 Monthly Fee Before Hosting Anything

The third problem was specific to agencies. It was more frustrating than the other two combined.

Per-seat pricing.

On Vercel Pro, a 10-person agency pays $200 per month in seat fees alone — $20 per seat, per month. Before deploying a single project. Before serving a single request. That's $2,400 per year just for the privilege of accessing the dashboard. (source)

For a Silicon Valley startup with venture funding, $200/month is a rounding error. For a 10-person agency in Prague or Porto, it's real money. It's the difference between profitable and break-even on smaller client projects.

The math is particularly painful when you're managing multiple client sites. Say you're running 15 client projects. On usage-based platforms, you're paying:

• $200/month in seat fees (your team)
• Plus bandwidth across 15 sites
• Plus function invocations across 15 sites
• Plus build minutes across 15 sites
• Plus edge requests, cache regeneration, and half a dozen other metrics

The seat fees often end up being the largest line item. More than the actual hosting.

This pricing model makes sense if you're optimizing for enterprise customers with dedicated DevOps teams. It doesn't make sense for European agencies where everyone wears multiple hats and the whole team needs access.

Add in the fact that Vercel, Netlify, and Render can't guarantee EU-only jurisdiction, and you start to see why our Templ customers kept asking us to build something different.

What We Decided to Build

We weren't trying to build a cheaper Vercel. Cheap isn't the story. Predictable is.

Here's what Velumi is:

One price per project. Plans start from €9 per month. Your baseline is plan price times number of projects you run. No per-seat fees layered on top.

Bandwidth is the only usage metric. We don't charge for function invocations, edge requests, build minutes, cache regeneration, or the dozen other things that can spike your bill elsewhere. Just bandwidth, one number, clearly shown.

No seat fees. Add your whole team. Add client collaborators. Add freelance developers. The price doesn't change. Because charging agencies per developer doesn't make sense when everyone needs access.

EU data residency by default. Customer workloads run in European data centres by default. For strict EU only requirements, the details depend on the full data flow, including any third-party services you connect.

DPA available. A Data Processing Agreement is available for agencies that need one, so you can provide it directly to clients during procurement.

Spend cap on every plan. You set a maximum overage charge per month per project. When you hit it, the site is throttled instead of silently running up a bill.

Built on European infrastructure. We are a European company using European infrastructure providers. This reduces exposure to US jurisdiction concerns.

We launched with Next.js support because that's what our customers were asking for. Static sites work too. More frameworks are coming.

Who This Is Really For

We built Velumi for three groups:

Agencies. You manage 10+ client projects. You need to quote hosting costs in proposals. You need EU data residency because clients demand it. You want everyone on your team to have access without paying $20/seat. The math needs to work on smaller projects, not just enterprise contracts.

Freelancers. You want to deploy in 10 minutes and know exactly what your bill will be at the end of the month. Every month. EU compliance isn't optional when your clients are European SMEs who take GDPR seriously.

Vibecoders. You built something real with Lovable or Bolt. You need a custom domain, HTTPS, and hosting that doesn't scream "prototype." Connect your GitHub repo and you're live. No Docker knowledge required. No nginx configs. Just push or drag & drop to deploy.

What We're Not Trying to Be

Let me be clear about what Velumi isn't.

We're not trying to replace Vercel for every use case. If you're a US enterprise team running a globally distributed consumer app at massive scale, Vercel is probably the right choice. They've built incredible technology. We have nothing but respect for what they've created.

We're not a bare metal VPS where you manage everything yourself. There are great options for that, like Hetzner and OVH. But that's not what our customers were asking for.

We're not trying to compete on having the most features on day one. We don't have edge functions in 300 locations. We don't have built-in AI tools (yet). We have reliable hosting with predictable pricing and data that stays in Europe.

We're building for the European developer who wants to deploy and stop thinking about it. For the agency that needs to put hosting costs in a client proposal and know they won't get a surprise bill. For the freelancer who wants the same thoughtless deployment experience as the big platforms, but with invoices they can predict and data residency they can guarantee.

An Invitation

If this sounds like your situation, you can try Velumi.

We're opening up early access as you read this. The platform is stable. The pricing is what I've described. You can deploy today.

Sign up for early access →

If you want to discuss fit first, we'd be happy if you reached out.

We built Velumi because our customers asked for it. Now we want to hear from you.

Emanuel

Sources

1. Reddit r/nextjs, pricing discussion thread (Jan 2026). https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1qnld0e/is_anyone_else_frustrated_with_vercel_pricing/
2. Vercel Community — "Outrageous billing on a monorepo" (Feb 2026). https://community.vercel.com/t/outrageous-billing-on-a-monorepo/34129
3. Doug Belshaw — "Digital colonialism: jurisdiction matters more than geography" (Jan 2026). https://blog.dougbelshaw.com/digital-colonialism-resistance/
4. Secure Privacy — "Data Residency Requirements: EU vs US Explained" (Apr 2026). https://secureprivacy.ai/blog/data-residency-requirements-eu-vs-us-explained
5. Wire — "Guide to European Alternatives for Enterprises" (Nov 2025). https://wire.com/en/blog/european-alternatives-enterprise-guide
6. Schematic, platform pricing analysis (Mar 2026). https://schematichq.com/blog/vercel-pricing