Imagine you have some kind of SaaS that customers pay for with microtransactions. You do some kind of work on uploaded data (let's say it's 1GB) and return dat

Imagine you have some kind of SaaS that customers pay for with microtransactions. You do some kind of work on uploaded data (let's say it's 1GB) and return data to the customer. The classic model forces you to make all kinds of upfront costs and predictions about usage. If you decide to support 10000 concurrent users you would need to provision a 10 terabytes of storage with high speed disks and maybe 10 beefy machines. Without actually having any revenue you need to invest at least $20k. In the serverless model, you can calculate how much it would cost. > 1GB upload + 120 seconds of 2G serverless time + 1 GB download = $0.15 Now you charge the customer $0.25 for your work and you make a neat $0.10 profit per task. If you have a lot of customers you make more profit, if you have no customers it costs you nothing. (except your development time, but that is not unique to serverless)