> AWS pricing is great because you aren't price-gouged if you don't use it? Precisely. If you spin up instances with a per-time cost and they aren't being used

> AWS pricing is great because you aren't price-gouged if you don't use it? Precisely. If you spin up instances with a per-time cost and they aren't being used, then you are wasting those instances. The engineering to automatically scale down instances when they are not being used, and to scale up (vertically and/or horizontally) when needed, is non-trivial to do correctly and, quite frankly, is now undifferentiated heavy-lifting. Paying a higher price when the infrastructure is being used and then not paying when it is not being used can and does result in lower overall costs when correctly architected. Personally speaking, my AWS bill last month for my serverless side-project was $2.74. Sure, this includes stuff in the free-forever tier. Does that really matter? Nobody rents servers out that cheaply. > you still need to pay for stuff like AWS KMS and API Gateway even if no client hits you with a request. For KMS, true, for API Gateway, wrong. API Gateway pricing is per-requests, not per-time. If there are no requests, there are no charges. In most cases, you don't really need to manage your own KMS keys; there is no added-value compared to using AWS-managed keys. Even if you do want to manage your own key, the pricing is a few bucks a month per key, including usage, unless your project is highly scaled up, in which case, you're in a completely different class of cost-optimization.