Lambda used to charge by chunks of 100ms. When they switched to charging by the millisecond, without otherwise changing the pricing, that was a universal price

Lambda used to charge by chunks of 100ms. When they switched to charging by the millisecond, without otherwise changing the pricing, that was a universal price drop. More granularity tends to mean cheaper for you. Your lawyer doesn't charge you by the second because charging in chunks of 6 (or 15) minutes is more profitable for them. If you're a very small player you're unlikely to care about the savings in question because they'll be single-digit, if that. But I'd argue that using AWS if you're a very small player -- and don't have plans to expand -- is a poor idea. Digital Ocean, Heroku etc are far more adapted to those use cases. AWS is a poor choice at tinyscale because of how flexible it is. It's a bring-your-own-everything service. You have to set up policies in order for AWS's own services to access each other and features offered in the web UI to work properly. Their billing systems make a ton of sense for the companies that spend millions of dollars. You would not be happy doing your grocery shopping at the warehouse that provides your local shop; and yet it would probably be cheaper overall as you'd be cutting the middleman. Of course you'd run into a lot of other issues. AWS is not stopping you from using it but still. There's a reason their most successful sales program is one that can afford dumping $100k on startups: "It's not for you." (Disclaimer: There's a fuckton of awful, actual billing issues with AWS that obscure the bill for no good reason. Most small players complaining are not talking about those, aside maybe from the egregious bandwidth pricing.)