A flat monthly price, not a meter that never stops running
Vercel is a brilliant frontend cloud, built around serverless and the edge and billed by how much you use. Ruust takes the opposite bet: a flat price per Egg per month in GBP, unmetered egress on every tier, and containers that stay warm around the clock. If you run lots of small, always-on apps, you will know exactly what the bill is before it arrives.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Here is how the two line up on the things that actually shape your bill and your architecture. Vercel is usually the stronger frontend platform, Ruust is built for predictable, always-on backends.
| Ruust | Vercel | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat GBP per Egg per month. Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. | Tends to be usage-based (bandwidth, function invocations and duration) on top of per-seat plans. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. Fair-use rate caps only. | Bandwidth tends to be metered, with an allowance and overage charges beyond it. |
| Cold starts | None. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7. No scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | Serverless functions can incur cold starts, and idle workloads tend to scale to zero. |
| Best-fit workload | Many small, always-on backend containers, APIs and worker apps. | Frontend and Next.js apps, static sites and serverless or edge functions. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis database Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your project. | No bundled managed database, usually pointed at third-party or partner data services. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other privately by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Oriented around public functions and the edge rather than private container-to-container links. |
| Regions | eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, Frankfurt and Singapore coming. Same price everywhere. | Broad global edge network for static and function delivery. |
| Own hardware | Bring Your Own Host: run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your Linux boxes, £2 per Egg (capped £20 per host). | Fully managed platform, running the runtime on your own metal is not the model. |
Vercel details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Vercel's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
The bill is a number you already know
Every Egg is a flat monthly price in GBP, the same in every region, with no seat or plan fee to start. Usage-based pricing is a tax on being always-on, so a busy month should not become an anxious one. You pick a size, you pay for the size.
Unmetered egress, so traffic is never a penalty
Egress is unmetered on every tier, from Nano to Large. A viral day, a chunky download or a chatty API does not turn into a surprise bandwidth line on your invoice. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps keep abuse out, but there is no metering or cap on volume.
Always warm, no cold starts
Every Egg stays running 24/7, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag on the first request after a quiet spell. That suits backends, APIs and side projects that must answer instantly, without you paying to keep a function alive by hand.
Batteries included for real apps
Connect a repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your own Dockerfile), pick a region and size, and you are live on HTTPS in about two minutes with TLS issued in roughly 90 seconds and renewed automatically. Managed Postgres and Redis, private networking, health checks and zero-downtime rolling deploys come in the box.
Where Vercel is the better fit.
Best-in-class frontend developer experience
If you are building with Next.js or a modern frontend framework, Vercel's developer experience is hard to beat. Preview deployments, framework-aware builds and tight git integration are genuinely excellent, and much of that lineage flows from the team behind Next.js itself.
A mature global edge
Vercel's edge network for static assets and edge functions is broad and well established. If your priority is serving a frontend and light logic as close to users as possible worldwide, that reach is a real advantage.
Serverless that scales to zero
For spiky or genuinely intermittent workloads, paying only for what you invoke and scaling to zero when idle can be the more economical model. If your traffic is bursty rather than always-on, that pay-per-use approach may suit you better than a flat always-warm price.
Ruust vs Vercel, the common questions.
Is Ruust a drop-in replacement for Vercel?
Not exactly, and it is honest to say so. Ruust runs your app as an always-on container (an Egg) rather than as serverless or edge functions, so it shines for backends, APIs and full apps. If your project is a pure Next.js frontend leaning on Vercel-specific serverless features, Vercel may remain the better home, and you can happily use both.
What does unmetered egress actually mean?
It means there is no metering or cap on egress volume and no egress line on your bill on any tier, from Nano to Large. We do keep per-Egg fair-use rate caps to stop abuse, but a busy, high-traffic month will not generate a bandwidth charge.
How is the pricing structured?
Flat, per Egg, per month, in GBP, and the same in every region. Presets are Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12 (most popular) and Large £24, or you can set a custom size on a slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB, with memory and vCPU scaling independently. There is no seat or plan fee to start.
Can I bring my own database or servers?
Yes to both. Use managed Postgres or Redis database Eggs with a persistent volume, or connect any external Postgres or MySQL by connection string. With Bring Your Own Host you can run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your own Linux boxes. It is pull based, so Ruust never dials into your host, and egress stays unmetered because it is your own pipe.