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heroku vs netlify vs vercel on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, heroku leads heroku vs netlify vs vercel with 28,703 mentions to vercel’s 10,634, peaking in Feb 2013.

Mention-over-time for heroku vs netlify vs vercel, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

heroku28,703 mentions, peak Feb 2013netlify7,638 mentions, peak Feb 2024vercel10,634 mentions, peak Apr 2026
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

The 'just deploy it' platform, reinvented each era: Heroku defines push-to-deploy in the early 2010s (and spikes again at its 2022 free-tier sunset), Netlify owns the JAMstack 2018–20, then Vercel takes the Next.js era from 2023.

The stories behind each line

Top “heroku” stories
  1. Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails 1,763 points · 2013
  2. Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? 1,006 points · 2020
  3. Removal of Heroku free product plans 908 points · 2022
  4. Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server 813 points · 2025
Top “netlify” stories
  1. Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site 1,783 points · 2024
  2. Netlify Dev 873 points · 2019
  3. Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify 616 points · 2024
  4. Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative 498 points · 2024
Top “vercel” stories
  1. We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack 1,154 points · 2025
  2. Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time 907 points · 2021
  3. Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative 498 points · 2024
  4. Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby 442 points · 2025

Each term on its own

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