Here’s something you can do for a little extra step that offers a lot more on a frugal budget: put your API and SQLite db together. Ideally, the API uses a low-

Here’s something you can do for a little extra step that offers a lot more on a frugal budget: put your API and SQLite db together. Ideally, the API uses a low-overhead binary serialization format and persistent conns. Then you can use edge stuff from whatever VC firm that is currently burning money and enjoy the free tier (currently though, Cloudflare workers is really generous - and free egress). The trick is that SQLite can run single-threaded a massive amount of qps. So you can pump large amounts of ops in serial which is trivial to reason about and allows for in-memory caching on the API side with trivial invalidation. And by still keeping your web serving separate, you can still enjoy edge-performance of handshakes, and skip db altogether for static pages. (The article underestimates the RTT issue - it’s very real - real world apps need more round trips than you think) Most of cpu outside of the db comes from parsing, deserializing, copying data, tls (both number of conns and encrypting data). By offloading the big chunks of these you can get easily 10s of thousands of writes/s on an entry level machine. Reads are faster. That said, I think it’s always worth benchmarking the typical bottlenecks especially io. Providers are lying and misleading a lot, so just run your own on their free tier. Just make sure to have some integration test/bench ready in case you need to switch up.