Everyone is deploying code to GitHub, GitLab or Butbucket and using Vercel or Replit to test deployment. It monitors your repo code and essentially provides you with a live functioning url of your code. Basically zero friction & currently zero-cost website hosting for early side projects. Without a server.

Should every developer continue to use that service, which I see no reason why they won’t, the Vercel team just need to allow content to be indexed and become discoverable. With trending repos, using AI to categorise them and allow the “mini-apps’ you mention to be tested before you integrate or adopt them.

No developer wants to spend hours or even days focused on just packaging-up, deploying code and setting up a server if they don’t know if their idea will get traction. They want to iterate fast and quickly, using the AI tools available. AWS will have a fraction of the influence in future, simply because Vercel and Replit make the developer experience 10x better and are constantly building tools to improve speed to deployment for devs.

They may not be great at monetising today, but they have tiers for all customers and costs to use their CDN network are lower. If they were to solve the discovery problem, I feel like they would be self-sufficient and corner the market without needing extra funding. Particularly as we may see a shift away from Apple and Google into PWAs or side-loadable apps on mobile.

I do wish we’d see a decentralised CDN version, but Vercel seems to be killing it. Just my 2 sats.