There's absolutely no reason to use Vercel. I've always run Next on our own servers, for multiple clients and some very complex projects. Page Router or App Router.
Ironically I choose to deploy our nextjs projects on Vercel because interacting with our inhouse stack means involving an infrastructure person who wants to critique and research how you’re developing your app. With Vercel I can just deploy a project and don’t have to ask Steve what the best set of server tools I need and then work with Steve on the monolith of Kubernetes configs to get it deployed. And while I like Steve, adding him to a project is a huge time sink and cost center all it’s own. Even if I get platform access to self serve, Steve will be there gating me for every little permission I need.
I hope you at least let devs deploy on whatever stack instantly with new projects and services with something selfserve-y like (Vercel/Heroku/etc).
