So let's start with this.

A few days ago I was looking at my Vercel bill and noticed something interesting.

This month I used around 300 GB of bandwidth. The charge for that? Around $18.

That's roughly $1 for every 16 GB of bandwidth.

Honestly, that's understandable. You're giving me a global CDN, edge infrastructure, caching, and all the other fancy words.

I have no problem paying for actual infrastructure.

What I don't understand is why I'm paying more for team seats than for the infrastructure itself.

Depending on the plan, Vercel charges around $20 per team member per month.

For what exactly?

RBAC?

Permissions?

A few tables storing user roles?

It's basically CRUD.

Why does managing a user cost more than serving hundreds of gigabytes of traffic?

That's the first thing that started bothering me.

The second thing is visibility.

If something goes wrong, I can't SSH into a machine.

I can't inspect the host.

I can't look at what's actually happening underneath.

If Vercel has a bad day, then I have a bad day.

The abstraction is great until you need to see through it.

The third thing is serverless.

The irony is kind of funny.

Serverless was supposed to be about paying only for what you use.

Somehow we've it ended up where running a simple application on a managed platform can cost significantly more than the underlying infrastructure itself.

And sometimes I don't even want serverless.

Sometimes I want a long-running process.

Sometimes I want workers.

Sometimes I want background jobs that live for hours.

Sometimes I just want a machine.

Now, the obvious response is:

Just use a VPS.

And that's fair.

A VPS gives me more control, more visibility, and fewer restrictions.

But it also gives me more responsibility.

The real problem isn't infrastructure.

The real problem is developer experience.

Vercel is convenient because it hides complexity.

Self-hosting is painful because it exposes all of it.

So the question I've been thinking about is:

What if self-hosting felt like Vercel?

Not a hosted platform.

Not another cloud provider.

A layer that sits on top of infrastructure you already own and gives you the experience people like about platforms such as Vercel while keeping the control and visibility of running your own machines.

That's the idea behind Relay.

Right now it's mostly questions, experiments, and half-finished thoughts.

We'll see where it goes.