The cost difference is purely based on hosting a similar stack on something like dedicated servers with OVH. However, as you would imagine, it would be far less

The cost difference is purely based on hosting a similar stack on something like dedicated servers with OVH. However, as you would imagine, it would be far less robust unless we had a team of DevOps to manage it, and clearly that's where a big cost comes in. Although, managing a somewhat similar stack for my full-time gig, it's not terribly time consuming. Development time was roughly the same: frontend work was identical to a standard enterprise-grade SPA app and backend is all Lambda functions, which would've been implemented similarly on, for example, NodeJS and Express (which is what as done anyway for testing). The primary cost (~60%) is due to the high volume of API Gateway requests. (Edit: see below comment for reason and plans to optimize) Edit: A HUGE time saving comes from being able to orchestrate AWS infrastructure easily via API and is well worth the premium in most cases. Our frontend application performs many automated management tasks of AWS resources such as S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Route53, etc... This of course does not directly relate to "Serverless," as it may be done by any application able to make API calls to AWS, however just the fact that it's possible for these resources is very appealing to a multi-hat developer with limited time on a side project.