Vercel began as ZEIT, whose Now deployment tool launched in 2016 with a simple idea: developers should be able to put a project online with one command. Deployment, routing and HTTPS were intended to become things the platform handled, rather than a separate infrastructure project. In 2020, ZEIT became Vercel as the product expanded from an individual deployment workflow toward a shared process for developing, previewing and shipping web applications. The same team created Next.js and used its own platform to build and deploy its work, connecting the framework developers write in with the system that gets their applications to users.