#77: Vercel Price Drops, React Bits, RIP Create React App, Shadcn-Registry, ESM-Only, NextStep, React Libraries 2025, Error Handling

𝕏 Recent Vercel Price Drops In the past few months, Vercel has continuously dropped in price while getting better in performance, making it harder than ever not to choose it for your next project. Here’s a rundown of the price reductions:

• ~85% off Functions with the introduction of Fluid
• ~87% off Monitoring → Observability
• ~50% off Domains
• ~75% off Log Drains
• ~65% off ISR read/writes
• Lower Image Optimization pricing (opt in)

Sunsetting Create React App – It’s official! Create React App is deprecated and the React team is pushing developers toward frameworks like Next.js or build tools like Vite. If you’ve still got a CRA project, don’t panic, they have published migration guides to help you move to something better. CRA had a good run, but let’s be honest… it was time.

Build a Next.js login page template – Learn how to build session-based authentication into a Next.js application from scratch, including the sign-in and sign-up pages, and how to protect routes.

I like the future of Next.js – Tiger explains why he is hyped up about Next.js' new caching setup which consists of file, component, and function-level caching, smart tagging, and custom cache profiles

Next.js 15: Error Handling best practices for code and routes – Shows how to catch unexpected errors, manage global failures, and handle 404s properly. Plus, tips on using ErrorBoundary, reset(), and useActionState to make your error handling rock solid

Designing backgrounds with LLMs and React – Learn how to create beautiful and interactive backgrounds with AI that you can use for your landing pages

React Libraries for 2025 – React’s ecosystem is huge, and picking the right tools can feel impossible. This article simplifies the chaos with a curated list of must-know tools for state-management, routing, styling, backend, and more

React Bits – An open source collection of high quality, animated, interactive & fully customizable React components for building stunning, memorable user interfaces

KokonutUI – The library has seen some major upgrades since it was last featured: more components, four new blocks, and the ability to open a component in v0 directly from the docs page for more customization

Zod Config – Load configuration variables from multiple sources type safely using Zod

NextStep – A lightweight onboarding library for Next.js and React applications based on the Motion animation library

More:

• React Bluesky Embed – Embed Bluesky posts, comments, and profiles into your React apps
• 𝕏 Stripe Plugin for BetterAuth
• tailwind-merge v3.0 – Support for TailwindCSS v4

Building a dropdown – Dropdowns seem simple until you actually build one. This deep dive covers common pitfalls, from accessibility to event handling, and explains why a solid abstraction (like Flyout) is key.

Shadcn Registry: A Better Way to Manage Your UI Components – The shadcn registry lets you share and manage UI components across projects without having to create npm packages. This post skips the basics and goes straight into hidden CLI tricks, setup insights, and real-world examples

Move on to ESM-only – Breaks down why it’s time to go all in on ESM, covering interop issues, dependency resolution, package size bloat, and Node.js’s new require(ESM) support. If you’re still on the fence, this article might be the push you need

We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly – Not your typical React-related read, but this one's worth the exception. Alex takes us through the reasoning behind the switch from React to Go with the goal to improve their app’s performance and unify the codebase