I tried V0 for the first time at a Vercel event hosted in NYC as part of the Columbia AI study group. Then, at another event in Toronto hosted as part of the Zero to Agent week. The pressure of a three-hour community event and $30 V0 (not Vercel, mind you) credits forced many to do more with less and try out new
What did I see? Interesting prototypes, though few were built for production life, given this environment.
Conclusion: Vercel launches and relaunches V0 even though their moat is clearly around a cloud product, Vercel, which customers seem to love. Vercel claims that 4 million people have used it. (It is 4 million users, accounts or tries - we do not know!) Most semi-serious coders who can prompt stick to Claude Code and Codex, which are hard to compete with, given the bundle. Replit and Lovable’s valuations keep shooting, even as their enterprise contract is probably a dead end for prototypes that are never shipped. Vercel’s generous free tiers for hobbies/personal projects mean few would pay individually for a separate prototyping agent.