Vercel — Budget

The core question

Did we regress past a measurable ceiling?

Philosophy

Vercel-shaped gates treat performance, accessibility, bundle size, cost, and latency as numeric budgets with hard ceilings. Raising a ceiling is a deliberate, reviewed choice — never a silent slide.

How Matter uses it

Per-route LCP / TTFB / CLS ceilings on apps/web; bundle-size budgets per app; axe-violation = 0 ceilings on every public page; AI-call cost budgets per gate; per-call p50/p95 latency budgets.

Common modes

static (for bundle analysis), visual, e2e, synthetic. The budget primitive normalises ceiling comparison across modes.

Production gates today

Future slice — Playwright / bundle-analyzer / Lighthouse wiring is the gate-prep work. Scaffolded as shadow gates in apps/web/__gates__/.

Industry inspiration

Inspired by Vercel's Lighthouse-CI integration and their stance on Core Web Vitals as a build-blocking metric. The pattern: ship a number, watch it over time, alert when it crosses a threshold.