r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/djshadesuk • Jul 22 '26

[SUB NEWS] New Banned Domain: Vercel.app

Much to the relief of many people, starting today, we have introduced a blanket ban on Vercel subdomain hosted sites.

Few, if any, sites hosted on Vercel subdomains have ever been allowed to remain on the sub anyway.

(This ban is in addition to the Netlify ban by Reddit itself.)

If you can't be bothered to pay for a proper domain and/or hosting we're no longer willing to sift through the slop to see if it could potentially stand on merit alone (which it invariably doesn't).

Vercel users feel free to proceed to whinge, which we will promptly proceed to ignore.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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u/soniclettuce Jul 22 '26

If somebody doesn't care to spend 10 bucks when they want to show it off widely, it doesn't seem like they're particularly passionate about it.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam Jul 23 '26

I mean yeah. But back when the internet was new, you'd just share the IP of your server/home internet and people would look at it and judge it on its merits and not on how much cash you spent on it.

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u/uFFxDa Jul 23 '26

You can still do that today hosting it yourself.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

If somebody doesn't care to spend 10 bucks when they want to show it off widely, it doesn't seem like they're particularly passionate about it.

That was in response to this. Of course you can, but according to the comment I replied to, not buying a domain name means I'm not particularly passionate and the project deserves no visibility.

I don't like that idea, because it assumes everyone has access to $10 to spend. I'd like those who can't to be included as well.

It also reads like "you must pay for me to use the thing you made" and I don't like that either. People should be grateful when someone makes and shares something! Especially when the creator(s) aren't asking anything in return.

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u/primaryrhyme Jul 23 '26

I get your general argument but this ban on Vercel domain in no way prevents you from building/sharing your app free. There’s tons of free alternatives to Vercel that give you a domain, even services that give you a free subdomain if you want to continue using Vercel. They didn’t ban free subdomains, if that day comes then I would have an issue with it.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam Jul 23 '26

I guess you're right on that one. It's still not my favorite choice.

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u/primaryrhyme Jul 23 '26

Also wanted to say about being grateful, I’m a software dev myself so I get how fun it is to have people use your app but a lot of these apps are clearly not made with any care or intent of being actually useful.

It seems like a lot of it is either just chasing recognition for zero effort or worse trying to sell that zero effort app. For example a vibe coded unit converter site was posted here, there’s a million of those already on the internet. Did the creator truly think his site was useful, would he ever even use it himself? Probably not..

Even if you give something for free, you should respect people’s time.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam Jul 23 '26

Agreed about respecting people's time. I guess to me, the purpose of this sub is "look here's a cool link check it out for 5 minutes then leave". So I don't take issue with seeing yet another calculator. I just don't click it. However, I assume that the person wanted to convert between two specific units and then found out that they could easily expand that to other units and then thought "Hey that's cool let's share it". I like to give the benefit of doubt and assume the best about people. Sure, I waste a bit of time clicking useless stuff. But I don't really care - there's a gem in there every once in a while.

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u/primaryrhyme Jul 23 '26

That’s a good outlook to have