Vercel Functions now support WebSocket connections in public beta, enabling bidirectional client-server communication directly on Vercel's infrastructure without additional configuration.
Connections run on Fluid Compute and use Active CPU pricing, meaning you are billed only for message-processing time, not idle connection time. Standard Node.js WebSocket libraries work out of the box, and Socket.IO is explicitly supported. The same limits and pricing rules that apply to standard Function invocations apply here.
The implementation details in the full documentation are worth reading: how Vercel handles connection lifecycle, what the concurrency limits look like under Fluid Compute, and where the edges of the beta constraints sit. If you are building realtime AI streaming or collaborative tooling on Vercel, this removes a major architectural workaround.
[READ ORIGINAL →]