I built a gateway to bypass Vercel limits (and save $20/mo)
Hey Indie Hackers,
I wanted to share a project I've been scratching my own itch with.
The Problem:
I love Vercel for the DX, but I hate the "Success Tax." I have a few side projects that get sporadic viral traffic. They make $0, but they occasionally hit the Serverless Function limit, which bumps me into the $20/mo Pro tier per team.
It felt unnecessary to pay enterprise prices for hobby traffic just because of a few spikes.
The Solution:
I didn't want to move to a VPS and manage Docker containers, so I built a middle-ground.
I wrote a lightweight API Gateway in Go (called Crate) that sits on a cheap bare-metal server.
- It tracks my bandwidth/requests in Redis.
- It acts as a load balancer, round-robin routing traffic across multiple free-tier accounts (Vercel/Netlify/DigitalOcean/GCP/AWS you pick your poison).
- It allows me to split traffic 50/50 between Serverless and a cheap VPS.
- I can also rate limit traffic to my endpoints to help reduce overall traffic from going crazy
The Result:
I can now handle about 3x the traffic volume on the free tier before paying a cent. I'm effectively using it as a "pre-firewall" for my Vercel bills.
Where I'm at:
I just launched it as a SaaS for $5/mo (grandfathered pricing) to cover the server costs. I'm looking for a few other developers who are tired of watching their usage meters to test it out.
I'd love feedback on the landing page or the pricing model. Is $5/mo a no-brainer to save $20, or does adding a middleware layer scare you off?
Check it out: https://crate.cc
I took a look at the landing page the tech is solid, but I think the main objection shows up before the performance pitch.
As a buyer, my first question isn’t “is this fast?” , it’s “what happens if Crate goes down?”
You already solved this with the fail-open architecture, but it’s buried. If that guarantee was in the hero section, the $5 feels almost risk-free.
Happy to help you reframe the hero + first section around “safety first, savings second” if useful.
The "Success Tax" framing is perfect. Paying $20/mo for a project making $0 just because of traffic spikes is a real pain point for side project builders.
The multi-provider load balancing angle is clever. Most people would think "move to a VPS" — but keeping the serverless DX while distributing across free tiers is a nice middle ground.
A few questions:
Latency overhead — How much does routing through the gateway add? For API endpoints where every ms counts, this could be a concern.
Provider detection — Do any of the platforms (Vercel, Netlify, etc.) actively detect and block traffic from known proxy IPs? This feels like a gray area that could break at any time.
Positioning — "$5 to save $20" is an easy ROI pitch, but the real value might be "peace of mind during viral spikes." Have you considered usage-based pricing instead of flat rate?
The landing page is clean. One suggestion: showing a real before/after cost comparison (e.g., "Project X: $60/mo on Vercel → $5/mo with Crate") would make the value more tangible.
Thank you for this feedback, it's very helpful.
I enjoy working with serverless functions on most of my projects so a solution like this actually solves a few problems for me. Ie: easy to route a nice neat API endpoint to the ugly urls functions get most of the time, easier rate limiting to help fight spikes, easy to deploy multi cloud and avoid any down time I'm the event of an outage (looking at the AWS outage a few months ago)
As long as it's deployed close to the project the latency is pretty minimal because I built it to load all all the routing rules into memory, the actual lookups are pretty much o(1). A little may be added for any transformations or rate limiting. But even fir rate limits my redis instance is on the same machine so again pretty negligible.
I haven't had any issues with blocking proxy ips yet, probably because I'm just not big enough to trigger anything. But I'd assume companies like Kong or tyke would potentially have the same issue, I'll have to cross that bridge when I get there.
I'd love to go pure usage based, and I may some day if I can get enough revenue. I mean $5 for 1tb seems like a good deal for almost endless traffic for a side project. And overages is just $0.01/GB that's 9x cheaper than AWS. To be frank the only reason I didn't go usage based from the start is payment processors don't do micro transactions and I can't afford to subsidize traffic until a bill gets high enough that I don't loose money on the deal, so $5 seemed high enough to make a profit and low enough to not kill the budget for most people.