Vercel

Vercel is the deployment platform built by the same team behind Next.js, and the integration shows. Connect a repository, point it at a branch, and you're live. Environment variables, build caching, edge functions, and serverless API routes all work without any configuration beyond what the framework already expects.

The feature that changes how you work most is preview deployments. Every pull request gets its own fully deployed URL — not a staging environment shared across branches, but an isolated deployment with its own environment variables if you need it. Sharing a URL for design review or client feedback becomes effortless, and it raises the bar for what "ready for review" means when a PR without a preview URL feels incomplete.

The free tier is reasonable for personal projects, though it can surprise you on bandwidth or function invocation limits for anything with real traffic. The platform is also opinionated enough that running the same stack elsewhere requires deliberate effort — serverless functions, Image Optimization, and Middleware all have Vercel-specific behavior that doesn't map one-to-one to a generic Node.js host. That tradeoff is worth it for the developer experience, but it's worth understanding going in.