· web
Two Sites Every Frontend Developer Recognizes - Vercel and CSS-Tricks
Two very different kinds of “famous” in the frontend world: Vercel is the company behind the framework and the platform that ships it; CSS-Tricks is the reference site that taught a generation of developers CSS.
Vercel: creator of Next.js, deployment platform
Per nextjs.org, Next.js is “maintained by Vercel.” Per Wikipedia, Vercel was founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT, renamed Vercel in April 2020, and “created and maintains the Next.js web development framework.”
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2015, as ZEIT; renamed Vercel in 2020 |
| Founder | Guillermo Rauch (also created Socket.IO and Next.js) |
| HQ | San Francisco, CA |
| Employees | ~550 (2025) |
The platform itself is what made it a household name for frontend teams: a global CDN (126+ PoPs across 51 countries), serverless Vercel Functions with multi-runtime support (Node.js, Python, Go), Git-driven preview deployments, and framework-aware zero-config builds. InfoWorld covered Vercel and Netlify together in 2022 as the two leading names in this “serverless PaaS” category — Netlify remains its closest competitor.
Vercel has also raised large funding rounds as it expanded beyond hosting into AI tooling (v0, AI SDK):
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series C | June 2021 | $102M | — |
| Series E | May 2024 | $250M | $3.25B |
| Series F | September 2025 | $300M | $9.3B |
CSS-Tricks: the CSS reference every developer bookmarks
Per its about page, CSS-Tricks was started by Chris Coyier, who “kicks things off and publishes the very first post… on July 4” 2007. The site introduced the CSS Almanac in 2010, and Coyier went full-time on it in 2012 via a Kickstarter campaign.
Its two most-cited resources are the Complete CSS Grid Layout Guide and the Complete CSS Flexbox Layout Guide, both linked from the site’s Guides index — pages widely reused as the default reference whenever Flexbox or Grid comes up.
Coyier’s other influential project is CodePen, the online HTML/CSS/JS playground he co-founded in 2012 with Alex Vazquez and Tim Sabat — CodePen is still linked directly from CSS-Tricks’ own footer.
In 2021, DigitalOcean acquired CSS-Tricks, bringing editor Geoff Graham along with it. The about page notes more than 200 writers have contributed to the site over the years, and it’s still publishing daily under DigitalOcean’s ownership today.
References
- Vercel — Wikipedia — founding as ZEIT in 2015, 2020 rebrand, creator/maintainer of Next.js, funding rounds and valuations, Netlify as a comparable PaaS competitor.
- Next.js homepage — confirms Next.js is maintained by Vercel.
- Vercel CDN overview — PoP count/country coverage and CDN architecture.
- Vercel Functions docs — serverless function model and supported runtimes.
- CSS-Tricks — About the site — founding date, first post, CSS Almanac launch, 2012 Kickstarter, 2021 DigitalOcean acquisition, contributor count.
- CSS-Tricks — Guides index — lists the Flexbox and Grid complete guides as the site’s top layout references.
- A Complete CSS Grid Layout Guide — example of the guide format referenced above.
- CodePen — Wikipedia — confirms Chris Coyier as a co-founder alongside Alex Vazquez and Tim Sabat, launched 2012.