infrastructure//Vercel//Vercel Functions

Vercel Functions are the serverless functions of Vercel. In a Next.js project they are the API Routes, backend code that lives in the same repo as the frontend: the routes defined in Next.js (`app/api/*/route.ts`) deploy as Vercel Functions automatically.

Vercel Functions are the serverless functions of Vercel. In a Next.js project they are the API Routes, backend code that lives in the same repo as the frontend: the routes defined in Next.js (app/api/*/route.ts) deploy as Vercel Functions automatically.

They run on AWS Lambda under the hood, with the same execution model (container spin-up, cold starts, per-invocation billing).

Their timeout is 10 s (Hobby), 60 s (Pro) or 300 s (Enterprise), and a function that takes longer dies. Heavy batch work (processing thousands of Gmail messages, for instance) will time out in a single function and needs a job queue like Inngest or Trigger.dev that breaks the work into chunks and processes them sequentially.

Vercel also offers Cron Jobs, scheduled functions that run at fixed intervals (hourly, daily, etc.), better suited to recurring batch work than cramming everything into one function call.

Against Workers, Vercel Functions are heavier (Lambda containers), slower to start (cold starts), but can run longer and have full Node.js access