Netlify built me a great year. The CLI is the cleanest in the category. The PR previews changed how I think about staging. I left when the free-tier deploy quota hit a wall I had not budgeted for on a Saturday afternoon. That is on me, not on them.
Vercel taught me what zero-friction deploys feel like. The first time vercel --prod shipped a Next.js app, I closed the laptop and felt I had cheated. I left because every product feature I wanted, I had to architect around their abstraction first. Image optimization, ISR, middleware, all elegant, all proprietary, all priced.
Cloudflare did not feel like a deploy platform. It felt like the internet, exposed to me as primitives. Workers at the edge, KV next to them, R2 for the bytes, tunnels for the laptop demos, Pages on top for static. One dashboard. One pricing logic. Things that took three vendors elsewhere take one binding here.
My infra bill across three products is now less than what one of those products was costing on Vercel alone. The platforms I left are still very good. The one I am on is the one I am building on now.