Which Vercel product did you use? What new capability did it give your team, and how did that shape the product you launched?
Maker
I built Ferra on Vercel for both hosting and its serverless functions. Most of Ferra's tools (PDF merge/split, image compression, text utilities) run entirely client-side, but a few — like PDF-to-Word conversion — need server-side processing. Vercel's serverless functions let me handle those without standing up and maintaining my own backend server, which mattered a lot as a solo developer trying to keep infra cost near zero.
Vercel's native Next.js support also shaped the product directly: I relied heavily on static generation (SSG) for every tool page so the SEO-critical content loads instantly and gets crawled reliably, while the interactive tool widgets mount as client components inside that static shell. Preview deployments on every PR also let me test each new tool safely before it went live.
Net effect: Vercel let me ship a fast, SEO-solid, mostly serverless product solo, without ops overhead.
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Maker
📌
👋 Hey Product Hunt!
I'm Basat, a full-stack developer, and I built Ferra — a free, no-signup toolkit of everyday utilities: PDF tools, image tools, text tools, and calculators, all in one place.
A few things that make it different:
🔒 Privacy-first by design — most tools run entirely in your browser. Your files never get uploaded to a server, they just get processed locally and downloaded back to you. No accounts, no tracking your documents, no "we'll delete it eventually" — it just never leaves your device in the first place.
🇧🇷 Built for Portuguese speakers — Ferra is fully in Portuguese (pt-BR). Most free tool sites are English-first with Portuguese as an afterthought (if at all); I wanted something that felt native, not translated.
⚡ No friction — no login, no watermarks, no "upgrade to premium" walls on basic tools. Pick a tool, use it, done.
Right now you can:
Convert, merge, split, and compress PDFs
Convert, resize, crop, and compress images
Count words, compare text, generate slugs, and more
Run quick calculators (age, BMI, percentages, unit conversions)
This is genuinely a solo, self-funded project — I built it because I kept needing these exact tools and getting tired of ad-choked, slow, or shady sites that make you upload your files to who-knows-where. More tools are coming in phases (I'm tracking everything transparently as I build).
I'd love your feedback — what's confusing, what's missing, what tool you'd want next. And if you know Portuguese speakers who'd find this useful, I'd really appreciate you sharing it with them. 🙏
Thanks for checking it out!