Smokes is a privacy-conscious iOS habit tracker I built and released in 2023. One of its features is a little motivator: random facts about the effects of smoking, fetched from a backend. Initially, this backend was implemented using Vapor, a Swift server-side framework, and hosted on AWS.
While this worked fine technically, it was also overkill. The backend only had a single route to fetch a fact: no auth, no database, just a tiny JSON source. Managing the deployment, TLS, availability, and updates through AWS quickly became a time sink.
Why Vercel?
I decided to replace the AWS-based setup with a simple Vercel function. One route, deployed from a JSON source, at near-zero cost. It integrates nicely into the repo and deploys automatically with every push.
Benefits:
- No more server provisioning or certificates
- Zero-cost tier for this simple use case
- Easy preview deployments
- Global edge performance
- CI and updates tied to Git
The full backend is now open-source on GitHub.
Conclusion
Vercel isn’t always the right tool. But for small, stateless endpoints like this, it’s a no-brainer. I spend less time thinking about infrastructure and more time shipping actual features in the app.
