How We Reduced Vercel Edge Requests & CPU Costs by 80% on a Next.js App Router Site

When building a fast-growing web application, hitting unexpected cloud tier limits is a rite of passage.

Recently, on our platform CardCheck—a web app designed to help Indian consumers compare credit card reward rates, lounge perks, and forex fees—we received a warning alert from Vercel:

Fluid Active CPU: 9.3 hours consumed (vs. 4.0 hours included on the Hobby tier — over 230% of our limit).

Edge Requests: Surging past 980,000+ requests per month (approaching the 1M limit).

Our traffic was growing, but our serverless usage was growing exponentially faster. Here is how we pinpointed the root causes, optimized our Next.js App Router codebase, and slashed our daily resource burn by over 80% in under an hour.