# Vercel ship 2025: the good bits > Another year, another set of features we are rapidly trying to keep up-to-date with. Vercel Ship 2025 is here, and there's a whole bunch of goodies that dropped that we specifically care about. **Published:** 2025-06-26 | **Updated:** 2026-08-11 | **Categories:** Tutorials Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXHdNiYBgC0 --- ## Transcript Hey, how's it going? So we're looking very on brand today. We're going to talk about Vercel Ship. So first of all, I'm going to tell you a little bit about it and we're going to do a whistle stop tour through all the different features and all the things that more specifically we find interesting because a lot of our stuff is focused around websites, clients, all that good stuff. Um, so first of all, Bot ID. This is kind of interesting to us in particular because Bot ID is an alternative to Google reCAPTCHA. And if you've ever used Google reCAPTCHA, you know it sucks. Um, Google reCAPTCHA is like one of the worst things and you've always experienced it where it's like click three buses or click some crosswalks or do this or do that just to be able to fill in a form, and then as soon as you have that, people just drop off completely. So this completely removes all of that. Um, this particular tool can sit on any kind of route or any kind of like function, and essentially check if there is a bot. And you can see there's a very simple version of the code here where it's saying: is it a bot? Check Bot ID. If it is a bot, access denied. If it isn't, then totally fine. Um, that's a really, really cool functionality. It's probably the most important thing, as far as we're concerned, that came out with Vercel Ship. And it gives you more granular control over using these things. And let me bring you on to the next one. So we got a couple to get through today. Uh, the next one is concurrent builds. So if you haven't experienced this, great stuff. If you have, this is very, very powerful. So it is where you basically make a whole bunch of changes to a website. And say the website takes two minutes, three minutes to build. Um, the first website, you made the change, but then uh oh, I left in a typo. So now we have two changes that we need to put in. So I do another build, and while the first three minutes is still building, you have to then wait the three minutes for the first one to finish, and then a new build comes in and does another three minutes, and it's six minutes later and you've actually seen the typo change. Um, this allows for on-demand concurrent builds, which basically means um you can essentially run two of them at the same time or three of them or four of them or five of them all the way up to 32 at once. Um, and it's on demand. So it's not that you have to pay for 32 different um environments or whatever build systems. You just basically have um, whenever you need it, an on-demand concurrent build. So it's pretty cool, and it's, you know, it's another step if you'll see this in all of these different ones. Um, it's another way that Vercel is doing something where it's not price gouging. It's actually very, very nice. Um, so yeah, let's move on to the next one. Uh, AI gateway. So again, if you're building AI right now, this is going to be helpful for you. This particular one is more about making the entire development experience easier when you know model 1.32 is going to change to model 1.33, or you know you're using OpenAI and then all of a sudden the next one that's better is on Gemini, or you know whatever system you're going to be using with AI. It's the idea that it can flick between any of them, any different model, any different vendor, and you just have one particular hub. Um, now I think the uh what is it, the AI SDK already is basically being used by the vast majority of AI companies out there, which is really, really cool. So if there is something where it's kind of um an AI (I don't want to say wrapper, I'm going to say wrapper) um on top of you know some functionality, let's say uh video captioning, anything like that. Um, this is really, really useful because all the time these models are changing, like literally on a weekly basis. And this just stops you from having to go out, find the API key, make all the changes, find all the nuances of the new changes. This is just, you know, you throw in a different URL, literally one line. Um, and it's fixed, and that's the new model running. Um, rolling releases. Now, if you are looking at this, first of all, why are you watching this video? Because this is far too large for this video. But essentially, rolling releases is when you have a massive, massive company, and you basically want to roll out a certain amount of um the new deployment to see if things are broken. Um, it's really, really powerful because it means that you can, you know, uh say you make an absolute dud of a change and you push it to prod. Um, and all of a sudden the performance goes down to 20%. This is going to be able to warn you before you distribute it to 100% of your customers, and maybe you'll find out at like 5%, and you'll go uh oh, I need to roll that back instantly. Hit the button, all good. But it's really nice, really nice uh development experience again. Um, and I want to talk a little bit about the firewall because the firewall keeps getting improved, and literally only today um I got challenged uh with it. Well, somebody got challenged on the website with a DDoS, um and basically 12 people got denied, which is great. So it's always running. It's always fantastic. And frankly, if you're setting it up just nice and native, the way that it's done through Vercel, it just works. I haven't had to think about any of this stuff. It just does everything it needs to do. And that's exactly what I want: more hands-off stuff. And then the Vercel agent. So this ties in very, very nicely with the firewalls because Vercel agents are very, very neat in the way that you can basically debug a good chunk of what's wrong. So for example, if I pick this here, I can drag this bit, and I can say, you know, uh what's what's happened here? What can I do to improve it? Um, how do I stop this from happening in the future? This is a great way of using like uh LLMs to be able to do a lot of the, you know, kind of grunt work that you don't want to have to do, and the debugging work that you don't really want to have to do, and just make your websites more secure and better and nicer. And then finally, we have micro frontends, that absolutely nobody knows what they do. Um, at some point somebody's going to find out why we've built microfrontends, but there's now microfrontend support, which is great. So yeah, have a great day everybody. Bye-bye. ## Frequently asked questions ### What was announced at Vercel Ship 2025? The standout launches were BotID (a reCAPTCHA alternative), Vercel AI Gateway (one endpoint for many AI models), on-demand concurrent builds (up to 32 in parallel), rolling releases, an upgraded Firewall, the Vercel Agent for incident debugging, and microfrontend support. The shape is consistent: most of these features remove a workflow tax rather than adding a new product. ### What is Vercel AI Gateway? Vercel AI Gateway is a single endpoint that proxies requests to any AI model or provider. Switching from OpenAI to Anthropic to Gemini becomes a one-line change instead of swapping API keys, retrofitting auth, and rewriting client code. It pairs with the AI SDK, which already powers a lot of production AI apps, and is mostly aimed at teams that wrap LLMs in their own products. ### What is Vercel BotID? BotID is Vercel's bot detection product. You call `checkBotId()` from a route or function, and if the request is a bot you deny it. There's no captcha, no "click all the crosswalks" puzzle, just a yes/no decision the platform makes for you. It can sit on any route, not just forms, which is what makes it more flexible than something like reCAPTCHA. ### Is BotID a reCAPTCHA alternative? Yes. BotID is positioned as a reCAPTCHA replacement. The selling point is the user experience: reCAPTCHA's puzzles cause real form drop-off, and BotID handles bot detection silently in the background instead. Because it's part of Vercel's platform, it can run on any route or function rather than only on forms. ### What are Vercel concurrent builds? Concurrent builds let multiple deployments build at the same time instead of queueing. Push a fix on top of a still-building deploy and it runs in parallel rather than waiting another three minutes. They're on-demand and scale up to 32 simultaneous builds, so you only pay for the parallelism you actually use. ### What are Vercel rolling releases? Rolling releases gradually expose a new deployment to a percentage of traffic instead of flipping it to 100% in one go. If you ship a regression and performance tanks, you catch it at maybe 5% of traffic and roll back before it hits everyone. It's mainly aimed at large-scale production apps where a bad deploy is genuinely expensive. ### What is Vercel Agent? Vercel Agent is an LLM-powered debugger built into the Vercel dashboard. You select a chunk of logs or traffic, ask what's going wrong and how to prevent it, and the agent walks you through diagnosis and fixes. It pairs especially well with the Firewall, since most of the "what is this attack pattern" grunt work moves off your plate. ### How does the Vercel Firewall work? The Firewall ships native DDoS protection and challenge-based filtering on top of every Vercel project. It runs continuously in the background, blocks bad traffic without manual rules in the common case, and surfaces challenges in the dashboard. The Vercel Ship 2025 update tightened the integration with BotID and Vercel Agent so investigation and response are mostly hands-off.