It's Vercel, it's their business model. They have all the minnows eating for free, and then once you pass a threshold, you're a whale with a whale–sized bill.
For high traffic check places like datapacket (no affiliation), or slightly cheaper, places like onlyservers (no paid affiliation, was a customer) or even find a transit provider and a colo and a server yourself. For $535 a month or less you can get a pretty good amount of bandwidth.
500 at hetzner, they don't go up to that price, and even with their prices raised during the RAM shortage, for 500, you can still have 5 servers each with 4TB NVMe and 128GB RAM, and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores).
Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.
For the same reason computing used to be defined by a Commodore 64 more than by an IBM System/370-XA mainframe from the same year — they're the most commonly and most easily accessible computing devices.
Old farts like us think the desktop is the default kind of computer, but it isn't. Most computers are phones, followed by tablets and laptops with touchscreens, and desktops are the weirdest ones.
It's not a question of what's the most common. It ought to be a question of what capabilities do you think of when you think of "a computer". Most people do not think of their phone as "a computer", even though us tech heads all know that it is literally just that.
We need to follow the lead of most people here, and recognize that the phone is a deliberately limited device and its capabilities do not define what "a computer" is or should be or could be.
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