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>You might be thinking: isn’t that expensive? Won’t we be paying hundreds of dollars to AWS? Nope—not with serverless solutions! The genuinely serverless soluti

>You might be thinking: isn’t that expensive? Won’t we be paying hundreds of dollars to AWS? Nope—not with serverless solutions! The genuinely serverless solutions are all pay per usage, so if your AWS account has zero activity, for example through the night and weekend when engineers aren’t working, then you won’t pay a dime. There are a few exceptions to this, such as S3 storage, DynamoDB storage, RDS storage, Route53 hosted zone, etc. costs, but they tend to be minimal. >For example, Plain’s January bill for our 7 developer accounts was a total of $150—pennies compared to the developer velocity we gain by everyone having their clone of production. Typically, the largest cost for each developer is our relational database: Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 PostgreSQL. It automatically scales up when it receives requests during development and down to zero after 30 minutes of inactivity. I don't understand this at all. If "7 full production instance cost $150" then your application is tiny and you don't need 15 AWS services. The storage costs alone should far exceed that for large application. If a $150 production instance is "scale" then we're lost as an industry. If you application is this tiny, Just. Use. A. Server.

gregplaysguitar 5y ago
They mentioned that most of the services are on-demand pricing, that’s why it’s cheap for a personal instance. Production presumably costs much more due to much higher usage.
jon_adler 5y ago
I think he is saying that each developer have their own environment with full production like architecture. There are benefits to having each developer running in their own sandbox, with full freedom to deploy breaking changes at any time. Besides storage, costs are usually 100% variable based on use. Each developer may not have a full replica of production data, as with TBs of data, storage cost might get expensive. Many serverless designs are impervious to the size of dataset, with sharding and auto-scaling, so the performance and scalability risks of running a subset of production data during development are typically minimal.
JimDabell 5y ago
> If "7 full production instance cost $150" then your application is tiny and you don't need 15 AWS services. Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising. Sure, if you are talking about dedicated EC2 instances or something, then a $150 “production” instance is tiny. But that’s not the situation here. $150 for developer load on serverless doesn’t correspond to $150 for a full production service.
- throuwout1234 5y ago
  >Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising. DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora are serverless storage solutions but you still pay for the data you store. It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21. For reference, a few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    > It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21. You misread. They didn’t say this.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    > few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month yeah we found out this the hard way. have you found an alterative to this? seems for us the biggest uncertainty is storage space since it is user generated and we have "unlimited" guarantee that we unfortunately need to grandfather. also curious nobody is talking about this for many small bootstrapped developers, this would be a no go. the only alternative I can think of is a hetzner dedicated box or a fleet of vps from DO or Vultr with S3 compatible API (not sure if such solution exists ).
  - paxys 5y ago
    Where did they say their production storage costs $21? The $150 bill is for their developer accounts.
deleted 5y ago
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akos-kri 5y ago
Hey, author of the post here. Apologies if the wording wasn't clear, but these are our developer AWS accounts, i.e. not production workloads. I was just highlighting that everyone runs a copy of the production infrastructure and since serverless is "pay for usage" we mostly only pay for when developers are firing in the handful of requests they do during development. None of our engineers have so far managed to generate gigabytes of data or millions of requests like our production account :)
DandyDev 5y ago
I'm confused as well. How can you run an RDS instance alone for 7 people for $150 a month? Let alone the other infra? You probably need a VPC on each account, with a NAT Gateway, which easily costs $20/month or so.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  VPCs are free. NAT gateway is unnecessary. It costs about twelve dollars to run serverless PostgreSQL for a month, assuming a forty hour workweek.

gregplaysguitar 5y ago

They mentioned that most of the services are on-demand pricing, that’s why it’s cheap for a personal instance. Production presumably costs much more due to much higher usage.

jon_adler 5y ago

I think he is saying that each developer have their own environment with full production like architecture. There are benefits to having each developer running in their own sandbox, with full freedom to deploy breaking changes at any time. Besides storage, costs are usually 100% variable based on use. Each developer may not have a full replica of production data, as with TBs of data, storage cost might get expensive. Many serverless designs are impervious to the size of dataset, with sharding and auto-scaling, so the performance and scalability risks of running a subset of production data during development are typically minimal.

JimDabell 5y ago

> If "7 full production instance cost $150" then your application is tiny and you don't need 15 AWS services. Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising. Sure, if you are talking about dedicated EC2 instances or something, then a $150 “production” instance is tiny. But that’s not the situation here. $150 for developer load on serverless doesn’t correspond to $150 for a full production service.

throuwout1234 5y ago
>Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising. DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora are serverless storage solutions but you still pay for the data you store. It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21. For reference, a few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  > It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21. You misread. They didn’t say this.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  > few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month yeah we found out this the hard way. have you found an alterative to this? seems for us the biggest uncertainty is storage space since it is user generated and we have "unlimited" guarantee that we unfortunately need to grandfather. also curious nobody is talking about this for many small bootstrapped developers, this would be a no go. the only alternative I can think of is a hetzner dedicated box or a fleet of vps from DO or Vultr with S3 compatible API (not sure if such solution exists ).
- paxys 5y ago
  Where did they say their production storage costs $21? The $150 bill is for their developer accounts.

deleted 5y ago

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akos-kri 5y ago

Hey, author of the post here. Apologies if the wording wasn't clear, but these are our developer AWS accounts, i.e. not production workloads. I was just highlighting that everyone runs a copy of the production infrastructure and since serverless is "pay for usage" we mostly only pay for when developers are firing in the handful of requests they do during development. None of our engineers have so far managed to generate gigabytes of data or millions of requests like our production account :)

DandyDev 5y ago

I'm confused as well. How can you run an RDS instance alone for 7 people for $150 a month? Let alone the other infra? You probably need a VPC on each account, with a NAT Gateway, which easily costs $20/month or so.

JimDabell 5y ago
VPCs are free. NAT gateway is unnecessary. It costs about twelve dollars to run serverless PostgreSQL for a month, assuming a forty hour workweek.