A GIVEAWAY!! Payload upgrades, Vercel pricing shift, Railway SMTP, and more

What’s up, everyone? Welcome to Next in Dev. In this issue, I cover Payload CMS updates, a quiet AI industry, and pricing updates to Vercel. Let's dive in.

Here’s the plan: I'm hosting a giveaway. The rules are simple.

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I’ll announce the winners of the first giveaway on Friday, October 10th. Happy referring!

Payload had 2.5 releases in the past 2 weeks: versions 3.55 and 3.55.1 and 3.56.

Version 3.55 saw a few lexical updates. First, they bumped the lexical version from 0.28.0 to 0.35.0. You also have the option to hide block handles now.

Version 3.55 includes two new UI updates. The first is that your collection folder tab preferences are now saved. The second is a new admin option autoRefresh. This option refreshes a user's token in the background, so it doesn't prompt them with the "Stay Logged In?" modal.

If you've been using recent version of Payload CMS, you've probably noticed that there have been console warnings about the wrong version of react-dom being used after running pnpx create-payload-app. That's finally been fixed in version 3.55.1.

You may have experienced issues logging in and navigating to a different page in production. The developers introduced this bug as a feature in 3.55, so they had to release a patch (v 3.55.1) to fix the issue.

Version 3.56 allows users to pass args to task onSuccess and onFail callbacks. So now you can perform some kind of logic when a task succeeds or fails. A global beforeOperation hook was added as well.

For bug fixes, version 3.56 fixes the inability to skip validation when trashing documents that have required fields.

Figma has had a slew of new updates. Figma added some new templates to Figma Make, and they released new Apple UI kits. There's a cool new feature where you can snap to a midpoint for a variable width stroke. It really is the small things.

Not much has happened outside the canary branch for Next.js. Vercel did release Version 15.5.3, though. As usual, these types of updates are just bug fixes in disguise. This version in particular fixes some type and validation issues with API routes and the satisfies keyword.

Vercel now supports Express backends with zero config. People barely want to host Next.js on Vercel, but I'm sure someone's excited about this one.

Big news in Vercel pricing. Pro usage is now credit-based. From the looks of it, this doesn't really change how much you pay, but there are a few other perks to the new Pro plan. This includes free viewer seats and spend management is enabled by default. The question now is...why wasn't spend management always enabled by default?

You can provision a MongoDB directly from the Vercel Marketplace now. I bet it'll be available on v0 in a few weeks' time.

Tailwind is slacking again.

AI news is still pretty quiet. It seems like all the fanfare around GPT-5 really let the air out of the AI industry. OpenAI had a few upgrades to Codex. They also released a vague joint statement with Microsoft about...something? For the upgrades—since OpenAI buried the lede on this one—there's a new IDE extension from Codex. The rest seems minimal.

Cursor added custom slash commands and improved the terminal for Cursor Agent.

Claude can now create and edit files. I thought it could already, based on my experience with Claude code. It often creates new files. Now you can make poorly designed PowerPoints in the Claude desktop app. Yaayyyy.

SMTP, which lets you send emails, is now available on Railway's Pro plan and higher. They blocked this before to prevent abuse, but now it's available. APIs such as Resend have worked and will still work if you're not on the Pro plan.

Monorepos now receive first-class support. This has always been technically possible, but now it’s supported, for real (for JavaScript, at least).

What did I miss? There’s so much happening in modern web dev that I’m sure I have missed something. Please share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email. I want to address your suggestions and may include them in future newsletters.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next one.