Leanly vs Vercel
Vercel is a great frontend platform — fast, polished, and easy to deploy to. But it runs on Vercel's infrastructure. Leanly deploys your app to your own AWS or GCP account. Same simplicity. Different ownership model.
This is not a feature comparison
Vercel and Leanly are not different versions of the same product. Vercel is a managed platform — your workloads run on their servers, in their infrastructure. Leanly is an orchestration layer — your workloads run in your own cloud account. It's a different category, not a better product in the same one.
The question is not which is better. It's which model is right for what you're building.
| Vercel | Leanly | |
|---|---|---|
| Where workloads run | Vercel's servers | Your AWS or GCP account |
| Cloud ownership | No | Yes |
| Vendor lock-in | Yes — proprietary runtime | No — standard cloud primitives |
| Compliance posture | "On Vercel's servers" | "In our own VPC" |
| Ops required | No | No |
| Cost model | Vercel margin on compute | Direct cloud rates + orchestration fee |
When teams move on from Vercel
The compliance question
Enterprise prospects and regulated industries ask: “Where does our data live?” The answer “on Vercel's servers” fails that question. Leanly deploys to your own VPC, in your own AWS or GCP account — you control where data lives and who can access it. For teams pursuing SOC 2, HIPAA, or enterprise deals, that distinction is often decisive.
Vercel is a frontend platform
Vercel excels at static sites, Next.js, and serverless edge functions. Full-stack applications with persistent backends, databases with direct connections, long-running processes, or custom networking run into its limits quickly. Leanly deploys the full application — not just the frontend layer — to infrastructure you own.
Pricing at scale
Managed platforms charge a margin on top of underlying cloud compute. As your traffic grows, so does the gap between what Vercel bills and what the resources actually cost. With Leanly, your workloads run in your cloud account — you pay AWS or GCP directly for compute. Leanly only charges for the orchestration layer.
Same ease of use. You own the infrastructure.
Leanly gives you the deployment experience of Vercel with workloads that run in your own cloud account. No proprietary runtime, no shared tenancy, no vendor lock-in — just standard AWS and GCP primitives in your VPC, under your IAM, on your bill.