You don't need Next.js

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Style Pass

2025-01-01 12:00:03

I started ComfyDeploy as an open source project (GitHub) - a full stack app with Next.js doing all the heavy lifting for both frontend and backend. We had Drizzle + Server Actions making everything type-safe and neat.

Next.js is a powerful full-stack framework, but its all-in-one approach can lead to development complexity as your application grows. Our decision to migrate was driven by two key factors: First, as an API platform, we needed to scale beyond Vercel's function limitations - a dedicated auto-scaling server made more sense than Next.js's API layers. Second, since our dashboard was primarily React-based and didn't require Next.js's server-side features, the framework's optimizations were adding unnecessary overhead. Moving to a pure React setup was the logical choice for our use case.

As we kept growing, we kept adding more libraries. The build just kept getting slower and slower. At one point, after adding Sentry, it hit 7 minutes. Seven. Minutes. Fixing a typo literally give you a coffee break.