[alien_]

It's not so much about the money as it is about the convenience of not having to maintain that VPS with security patches and so on and automatically getting it scale without any effort if needed. You can just focus on the actual code.

It's also more convenient if you are shipping your software to your users instead of running in SaaS mode, like I do with my https://autospotting.org project. I wouldn't want to ask my users to pay, run and maintain an EC2 instance for it.

Those who appreciate me doing this would hopefully donate those $5 to me on Patreon :-)

[throwaway98121]

These are good reasons, but how many projects really have such a need to scale, for example?

If you have let’s say a massive developer organization, some level of abstraction so you don’t have to manage provisioning servers/hosts and invest time in undifferentiated (no or low value add) activities is great.

The cost of these function as a service solutions is very high though, even in those scenarios, at least from my own experience.

A lot of people rush to these solutions and CTOs blindly sign off without realizing it’s just added tech debt.

[alien_]

The initial question was about side projects, that may or may not need to scale but often run at pennies monthly.

Hopefully someday the side project launches and makes it to the first page of HackerNews or ProductHunt and then you need to cope with insane amounts of (mostly junk) traffic, which can be hard if you just happen to have a $5 VPS, so you're likely to fail your launch.

At sustained scale serverless solutions can be very expensive indeed, but that's a great problem to have for a side project.

Large organizations or established projects would likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to run their compute on EC2, maybe with RIs or spot or a combination of these (or their equivalents on other cloud/VPC providers), or even on bare metal if the usage patterns are sufficiently flat.