Vercel brings AWS PrivateLink to Pro and Enterprise plans

Vercel opens private AWS connections to Pro and Enterprise

Vercel has made AWS PrivateLink available to teams on its Pro and Enterprise plans, according to a changelog post on the Vercel blog. The feature is bundled into the platform's Advanced Networking offering and lets Vercel Functions and build processes talk to services hosted in AWS without that traffic ever crossing the public internet.

Until now, workloads running on Vercel's edge and serverless infrastructure typically reached databases and internal APIs the same way any external client would: over publicly routed, encrypted connections. PrivateLink changes that model by keeping the traffic on AWS's internal network path.

What developers can connect to

Vercel outlines a broad set of supported targets. The feature can be used to reach AWS-hosted databases including RDS, Aurora and Neon, along with SaaS platforms delivered through AWS such as Snowflake and MongoDB Atlas. Internal services sitting behind an AWS Network Load Balancer are also covered, and Vercel points to gateway endpoints as the way to reach S3 and DynamoDB.

In practice, that covers most of the backend surface a typical Vercel-deployed application depends on, which is what makes the announcement more than a niche networking option.

How setup works

The configuration flow lives in a project's Networking settings. After enabling Advanced Networking, developers select New Connection and enter the service name and region of the AWS endpoint they want to reach. Vercel then provisions the connection and returns a hostname that remains stable over time, which developers drop into their Functions and builds in place of a public endpoint.

There is one requirement on the AWS side: the target service must either accept connections from all AWS principals or explicitly allowlist the IAM role that Vercel generates for the team. The allowlist approach is the more restrictive of the two, and likely the one security-conscious teams will prefer, since the service stays closed to everyone else.

Pricing

Vercel's pricing for the feature is tiered. The first PrivateLink connection is included with Advanced Networking, which itself is a paid add-on. Each additional connection costs $30 per month, and data transferred over PrivateLink is billed at $0.04 per gigabyte. Teams running several isolated environments, such as production, staging and preview backends, will therefore see the connection fee multiply quickly.

Why it matters

The split-architecture pattern, frontend on Vercel, data and internal services on AWS, is extremely common, and networking has long been its awkward seam. Private traffic between the two halves previously required workarounds such as IP allowlisting, VPN tunnels or proxy layers, none of which fit serverless compute especially well.

By supporting PrivateLink natively, Vercel removes that friction and strengthens its pitch to larger customers, particularly those whose compliance requirements frown on databases and internal APIs being reachable from the public internet at all. The feature also nudges the platform toward being a viable home for full-stack enterprise workloads rather than just frontend hosting.

The plan gating is worth noting: PrivateLink is limited to Pro and Enterprise, and it depends on Advanced Networking being enabled. Hobby-plan users are excluded, so for smaller projects the public-internet path remains the only option.