Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.
What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.
Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.
Did YOU even bother to look at their site? They support more than static generation, including SSR and even API endpoints. That means Astro has a server that can run server-side (or serverless) to do more than static site generation, so it's not just a static site generator either.
And yes I can see you're posting the same lie all over the comments here.
Can you describe what you mean here? Because I have heard this about 100 times and never understood what people mean when they say this. I am hosting a NextJS site without Vercel and I had no special consideration for it.
