Vercel Ship is Vercel (opens in new tab)'s annual conference, and this year it happened on Thursday, October 15, 2026, at the Palace of Fine Arts (opens in new tab) San Francisco. Jono and Sne from our team went. This is a write-up of the day while it's still fresh in our memories, which it should be, because it was literally last week.
We build on Next.js and Vercel for nearly everything we ship, including this site, so Vercel Ship is one of the few conferences where every session was about tools we use daily. Last year we wrote up Ship AI 2025 announcement by announcement.
This one is more about the event, meeting people, sharing notes, appreciating cool swag and Vercel's new releases.
Vercel put on a very good event
Quelle surprise, this was no surprise, Vercel sweats the details. The venue was beautiful, and the people attending were cracked.
There was a Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 (opens in new tab) car on display and a Vercel Racing Club suit on a chrome mannequin. There were booths of companies such as Cursor (opens in new tab) and Supabase (opens in new tab), where you could chat with their team and learn about their products.
The event was, in equal measure enterprise grade and nerdy. Tech conferences sometimes have a trade-off between allowing networking and delivering good talks on the stage, Ship was good at both.
Meeting the GOATs
Ship had so many tech legends. Some we met, others we watched from the audience. For us, it was about learning, getting inspired and crunch time (yes, we brought our laptops).
We got to say hello to Matt Palmer from Cursor and see legends like Evil Rabbit and Theo Browne. Because of the scale, it was quite spread out, and there wasn't much scope for cosy-networking (whatever that means).
The Vercel partner's event felt much warmer in terms of meeting people. We met Magnus Hillestad, one of Sanity (opens in new tab)'s co-founders, the Datadog (opens in new tab) team from New York and Eric Gandhi from Supabase. There were plenty of others too, and we'd rather leave names out than get them wrong.
We also jammed with the awesome Inth (opens in new tab) team. They've built the fastest cookie banner, that keeps your site compliant in every painfully red-tape country in the world. If you haven't heard us ranting about cookie banners before, check out our cookie banner post.
We met an ex-Figma employee. This was funny because we've been fairly vocal about moving our design work away from Figma (opens in new tab) to Paper.design (opens in new tab). For better or better, she launched her own start-up and is crushing it, so the guilt lasted only about a minute. Shoutout to BB (opens in new tab)
Talking to industry leaders in person is different from reading their posts. You get the reasoning behind decisions, not the polished version and that's most of the reason to go.
Magnus Hillestad, Sanity co-founder
Matt Palmer, Cursor
Eric Gandhi, Supabase
The Datadog team, New York
Chris and Will, Inth
Evil Rabbit, Vercel
Bersabel Tadesse, BB
Jono and Sne, Roboto Studio
The partner event venue, San Francisco Bay
The venue, Palace of Fine Arts
What shipped at Vercel Ship
We'll keep the product news short, because there's plenty of it on vercel.com/ship (opens in new tab). The list there includes Vercel Daemons for background workers, Drives for persistent storage in Vercel Sandbox, Bring Your Own Cloud on AWS and a container runtime for apps in any language. We'll write about the ones we try once we've actually tried them on a separate blog.
What's shipped for AI agents?
- Drives for Sandboxlive
Agents can now keep their files between runs. Without that, they start every task from scratch. With it, they can pick up where they left off.
- eve upgradesnew
eve, Vercel's agent framework, now has memory, add-ons and dashboard setup. Agents can remember past work, and teams can create or deploy one without touching the command line.
- Vercel Connectlive
Over 1,000 ready-made connections to the apps teams already use. Agents get access to real business tools without custom integration work. This has been live since August.
- MCP Eventsbeta
Agents can now act when something happens in a connected tool. They no longer wait for someone to prompt them, so they can run on their own.
Agents now keep their files between runs (Drives, live), remember past work (eve, new), reach 1,000+ business apps (Connect, live) and act on events without a prompt (MCP Events, beta).
What's shipped for AI Gateway?
- Budgetsnew
Teams can cap AI spend per key, project, person or team. Cost overruns are one of the main reasons AI pilots get stopped, and this puts a hard limit on them.
- US-only inferencenew
AI requests stay on US servers. That's often the deciding question for regulated industries and US public sector buyers.
- Zero data retentionrepeat
AI providers keep none of your data. This launched in April, and Vercel highlighted it again on stage.
- Token Passearly access
Pro teams pay $30 a month and get $80 of open-model credit. Trying cheaper open models becomes a low-risk experiment.
Teams can cap AI spend per key, project, person or team (Budgets, new) and keep requests on US servers (US-only inference, new). Providers still keep none of your data (zero data retention). Pro teams can pay $30 a month for $80 of open-model credit (Token Pass, early access).
What's shipped for Enterprise?
- Bring Your Own Cloud on AWSlive
Vercel runs inside the company's own AWS account. Companies whose policy keeps everything inside their own cloud can now use Vercel without breaking it.
- Managed access for Connectbeta
IT approves what agents can reach, using the company's existing login. Agents get access to company tools the same way employees do, under the same controls. Huge for governance
- Vercel for Enterprisenew
One place to control models, data and AI budgets. Leadership gets a single view of how AI is used across the company.
Vercel can now run inside a company's own AWS account (Bring Your Own Cloud, live). IT approves what agents can reach through the existing company login (Managed access for Connect, beta). One place controls models, data and AI budgets (Vercel for Enterprise, new).
Hanging out with a cool agency owner
Jono and Sne took a very Vercel-esque picture with Hal from Candid Leap (opens in new tab) outside the Ship SF containers. For the record, we love sharing notes with other agencies, and just jamming with them in general.
Cool swag, need it in pink
Vercel sold us on the limited edition bomber jacket (no regrets) - if HMRC is reading this, it's a collaborative marketing tax-write-off.
In all honesty, it is really well-built and the designer was handing it out himself. Bonus, a super fun agency, Monogram (opens in new tab), designed the jacket. We are a huge fan of their work, so I justified paying $300 (sob sob). All jokes aside, shoutout to TJ Kohli (opens in new tab) for his work and let's hope we get a pink edition next year.
If you made it this far, please vouch for the pink edition YOLO :)
@sne_hil @grimcodes @addiefishes 👀
What we're doing next
We're working on animations and easings at Roboto and redoing our design.md file. We'll write it up when there's something to show. If you're building on Next.js and Vercel and want a team that turns up to these things, have a look at our Next.js services or book a scoping call.
