Vercel WebSocket support reaches general availability at 15 million daily connections

WebSocket support reaches general availability

Vercel has moved WebSocket support in Vercel Functions out of beta and into general availability. According to the company's changelog, the feature carried substantial traffic during its public beta, which opened in late June: Vercel's CDN has handled 300 million WebSocket connections since then and currently handles around 15 million each day.

The promotion means persistent, two-way connections — historically an awkward fit for serverless platforms — are now a standard, production-ready part of Vercel's offering rather than an experimental opt-in.

The serverless problem WebSockets solve

Serverless functions are designed around short request-response cycles: a request arrives, code runs, a response is returned, and the execution environment winds down. WebSockets invert that model. A client opens a single long-lived connection, and either side can push messages at any moment — exactly the pattern behind chat interfaces, live dashboards, multiplayer games and token-by-token AI responses.

Until platforms added native support, teams hosting the rest of their application on Vercel typically had to run this persistent layer elsewhere, on a dedicated realtime service or an always-on server. With WebSocket support in Vercel Functions, that piece of the stack deploys to the same target as everything else in the project.

Where it is being used

Vercel says customers are using the capability for AI chat, streaming, and realtime multiplayer applications. The company also notes that WebSockets power the realtime models available through its AI Gateway product, which indicates the feature is load-bearing for Vercel's own services and not merely an add-on for customers.

Pricing and limits

According to Vercel, WebSocket connections are governed by the same quotas and pricing rules that apply to ordinary function invocations, so there is no separate billing category for realtime traffic. Under the platform's Active CPU pricing model, compute charges accrue only while a function is actively processing messages rather than across the entire lifetime of a connection, which keeps the cost of long-lived but lightly used connections contained.

Why it matters

Realtime interaction has shifted from a nice-to-have to a baseline expectation, driven largely by AI: streamed responses, voice agents and live assistants all assume a persistent channel between client and server. Serverless platforms, built for short-lived execution, have historically been a poor home for that pattern, pushing developers to bolt on external realtime infrastructure and manage a second deployment and billing stack.

By making WebSockets generally available and folding them into the same invocation and pricing model as ordinary functions, Vercel removes much of that friction. The usage figures the company reports — 300 million connections since late June and 15 million per day now — point to genuine adoption rather than a niche launch. For teams already deploying on Vercel, the practical effect is a simpler architecture: one platform, one billing model, and native support for the long-lived connections that modern interactive applications rely on.