Workflow SDK now compresses run and step payloads
By Steven Van ·
Workflow SDK 5 beta compresses payloads with zstd, cutting storage and cost by up to 85% for AI conversation data.
The Vercel Workflow SDK 5 beta now compresses run, hook, and step inputs and outputs with zstd. Compression only kicks in when it helps: small payloads are left as-is, while larger ones are compressed before being persisted, making them cheaper to store and faster to read and write.
The savings are largest for JSON payloads typical of AI conversations, where storage size and cost can drop by up to 85%. Vercel gives an example of one typical Workflow that runs and stores at 52 MB uncompressed versus 10 MB with zstd compression. Since eve builds durable agents on the Workflow SDK, the same compression now applies to the conversation history and state it persists for every session, so eve agents store less and run faster with no code changes required.
The feature is available by updating to workflow@5.0.0-beta.19 or later.
