For ten years, Templ has done one thing: managed WordPress hosting for European web agencies. It’s a focused business and we like it that way. Agencies trust us with their clients’ most important sites, and we keep those sites fast, secure, and online.
So the conversation that started showing up late last year caught my attention. It wasn’t about WordPress at all.
Agency after agency was asking the same thing: “Can you host our Next.js sites too?”
These were our own customers — people who already run their WordPress projects with us. Their dev teams had started building marketing sites, client dashboards, and storefronts in Next.js. They were deploying those on a usage-based platform, it worked technically, and the developer experience was good. But three problems kept coming up. The same problems, over and over, and all three were forcing agencies into uncomfortable conversations with their own clients.
The bill that started it
One call stuck with me. A Stockholm agency we’ve worked with for years called, frustrated. They’d put a client’s e-commerce frontend on a usage-based PaaS, and the monthly bill had jumped from €95 to €780 — in a single month.
“I quoted my client €150 a month for hosting,” he said. “How do I explain a €780 invoice?”
It wasn’t one runaway charge. It was build time, backend calls, caching, edge requests — each line item looked reasonable on its own. Added together, the total was impossible to predict at the moment they were quoting a fixed monthly retainer.
If you run an agency, you know exactly why this is a problem. Hosting gets bundled into a monthly retainer. That only works when the underlying cost is predictable. When it isn’t, it’s not an annoyance — it’s a margin risk you carry every month.
This wasn’t a one-off. Developers have been saying the same thing publicly:
I’m CTO of a small startup… Last month the bill jumped from under $100 to over $800. This is for an application that is just hosting the front-end.
— u/BaumerPT, r/nextjs, Jan 2026 source
The platforms have added spend tools since — alerts, caps, auto-pause. But they’re opt-in, not defaults, and they don’t fix the root cause: complexity. When you’re tracking nine separate meters for builds, requests, caching, and bandwidth, just predicting the bill becomes a job.
“But where is the data actually stored?”
The second problem is one we know intimately at Templ, because it’s the reason a lot of agencies host their WordPress with us in the first place.
Every agency we talked to was hearing the same question from clients: “Where is our data hosted?”
Five years ago that was a niche compliance footnote. Today it’s in every RFP, every procurement checklist, every contract negotiation — especially in Europe.
Here’s the honest version: GDPR does not always require EU hosting. But EU hosting is often the simplest answer in a client conversation. US providers can be subject to US jurisdictional access requests even when the data physically sits in Europe. For some clients — finance, healthcare, public sector — that legal exposure alone is enough to fail procurement, regardless of the technical setup. (source)
And the legal ground keeps shifting. The EU–US Data Privacy Framework survived its first challenge in September 2025, but it’s under appeal, and previous frameworks were struck down by European courts. (source)
The market has clearly picked a direction. Traffic to european-alternatives.eu surged 1,100% in 2025. Worldwide sovereign cloud investment is projected to hit $80 billion in 2026, with the European sovereign cloud alone accounting for $12.6 billion. Even AWS is building a European Sovereign Cloud with a €7.8 billion commitment. (source)
So our customers had a strange split. Their WordPress sites sat safely on European infrastructure with us — and a clear answer for procurement. Their Next.js sites sat somewhere they couldn’t get a clean “EU only” answer for. When that question turned into a cross-border legal review, the sales cycle slowed to a crawl, and the agency ended up doing compliance work they never priced into the project.
The €200 a month before hosting anything
The third problem is specific to agencies, and it’s the one that frustrates them most.
Per-seat pricing.
On a typical Pro tier, a 10-person agency pays around $200/month in seat fees alone — $20 per seat — before deploying a single project or serving a single request. That’s roughly $2,400 a year just for dashboard access. (source)
For a venture-funded startup, $200/month is a rounding error. For a 10-person agency in Prague or Porto, it’s real money — the difference between a profitable small project and a break-even one.
It gets worse the more client sites you manage. Run 15 client projects and you’re paying:
- ~$200/month in seat fees (your team)
- plus bandwidth across 15 sites
- plus function invocations across 15 sites
- plus build minutes across 15 sites
- plus edge requests, cache regeneration, and a handful of other meters
For a lot of agencies, the seat fees end up larger than the actual hosting. That model makes sense if you’re selling to enterprises with dedicated DevOps teams. It doesn’t make sense for a European agency where everyone wears several hats and the whole team needs access.
So we built Velumi
We had a choice. We could bolt some Next.js support onto our WordPress platform and call it a day. Or we could build the thing our customers were actually describing.
We built the thing. It’s a separate product called Velumi — managed hosting for Next.js and static sites, from the same team behind Templ, on European infrastructure.
We weren’t trying to build a cheaper version of what already exists. Cheap isn’t the point. Predictable is. Here’s the shape of it:
- One price per project. Plans start at €9/month. Your baseline is plan price × number of projects. No per-seat fees layered on top.
- Bandwidth is the only usage metric. No charges for function invocations, edge requests, build minutes, or cache regeneration. One number, shown clearly.
- No seat fees. Add your whole team, client collaborators, freelance devs — the price doesn’t change.
- EU data residency by default. Workloads run in European data centres. (As always, strict “EU only” depends on your full data flow, including any third-party services you connect.)
- DPA available. A Data Processing Agreement you can hand to clients during procurement.
- A spend cap on every plan. You set a monthly overage ceiling per project. Hit it and the site throttles instead of quietly running up a bill.
It launched with Next.js support because that’s exactly what our agencies asked for. Static sites work too, and more frameworks are on the way.
To be clear about how this fits together: WordPress stays on Templ. Velumi is for the modern frontend stack your dev team is building alongside it. Same people, same European infrastructure philosophy, two products for two jobs.
Who this is really for
We built Velumi with three groups in mind — and the first one is the agencies we already work with every day.
Agencies. You manage 10+ client projects. You need to quote hosting in proposals and not get burned by a surprise bill. You need EU data residency because clients demand it. You want your whole team to have access without paying $20 a seat. The math has to work on the small projects, not just the enterprise contracts.
Freelancers. You want to deploy in ten minutes and know exactly what the bill will be at month’s end. Every month. And EU compliance isn’t optional when your clients are European SMEs who take GDPR seriously.
Vibecoders. You built something real with Lovable, Bolt, or v0, and now you need a custom domain, HTTPS, and hosting that doesn’t look like a prototype. Connect a GitHub repo and you’re live — no Docker, no nginx configs, just push or drag-and-drop to deploy.
What we’re not trying to be
Let me be honest about the boundaries.
We’re not trying to replace every usage-based platform for every use case. If you’re a US enterprise running a globally distributed consumer app at massive scale, the incumbents have built genuinely impressive technology and may well be the right call. We have a lot of respect for that work.
We’re also not a bare-metal VPS where you wire up everything yourself. Hetzner and OVH are great if that’s what you want — but it’s not what our customers were asking for.
And we’re not racing to have the longest feature list on day one. What we have is reliable hosting, predictable pricing, and data that stays in Europe — for the agency that needs to put a hosting number in a proposal and trust it, and for the developer who wants to deploy and stop thinking about it.
If this sounds familiar
If you’re a Templ customer who’s been deploying Next.js somewhere else and quietly dreading the invoice — this is the part where I tell you we built the alternative you kept asking for.
Velumi is in early access now. The platform is stable, the pricing is exactly what I described above, and you can deploy today.
Try Velumi — sign up for early access →
Want to talk through whether it fits before you move anything? Reach out and we’ll help.
We built Velumi because our customers asked us to. Now we’d like to hear from you.
Sources
- Reddit r/nextjs, pricing discussion thread (Jan 2026). https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1qnld0e/is_anyone_else_frustrated_with_vercel_pricing/
- Vercel Community — “Outrageous billing on a monorepo” (Feb 2026). https://community.vercel.com/t/outrageous-billing-on-a-monorepo/34129
- Doug Belshaw — “Digital colonialism: jurisdiction matters more than geography” (Jan 2026). https://blog.dougbelshaw.com/digital-colonialism-resistance/
- Secure Privacy — “Data Residency Requirements: EU vs US Explained” (Apr 2026). https://secureprivacy.ai/blog/data-residency-requirements-eu-vs-us-explained
- Wire — “Guide to European Alternatives for Enterprises” (Nov 2025). https://wire.com/en/blog/european-alternatives-enterprise-guide
- Schematic, platform pricing analysis (Mar 2026). https://schematichq.com/blog/vercel-pricing
