Half the Next.js apps we review are entirely behind a login screen.
Which means the main reason they chose Next.js — server rendering for search engines — is doing nothing for them at all.
Google never sees a dashboard. It never sees a billing page or an admin panel. But the team still carries the cost of that decision every sprint: two runtimes to reason about, server and client boundaries to keep straight, a hydration bug class that only shows up in production, and a hosting story that is no longer just static files behind a CDN.
The honest version of the question is not React or Next.js. It is: does this product need to be rendered before a user is authenticated?
Marketing site, docs, pricing, public listings, anything shareable — yes, and Next.js earns its complexity there. Internal tooling, dashboards, anything gated — a client-rendered app with a plain API is usually faster to build and far cheaper to keep alive.
Our rule when we scope a frontend: split the public surface from the private one early. They have different requirements, and forcing one framework across both is how teams end up paying for capabilities they never use.
For teams running Next.js on a fully gated product: what made it worth it for you?