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by freehunter 2149 days ago
I think you massively mis-read the article. $279/mo is what he would have spent. What he actually spends is under $1/mo. Sure a $50/mo Heroku box would do the trick but why spend $49/mo MORE when serverless is cheaper?

What I want to hear is how you argue serverless is “snake oil” when evidence says it’s massively cheaper even at scale. Less than $1/mo to serve 141m requests. How is that snake oil when even you say an equivalent “serverfull” solution costs 50x more?

1 comments

Well, not exactly

1. You are saving $49 month by spending 250+ hours engineering hours to structure the application which is near impossible to extend/maintain.

2. The $49/month subsidy (free tier) you are getting is temporary and will eventually go away (think about google maps api price change).

3. 50x cost for serverfull solution is not a right number. lets say you have to handle 500M requests per month (around 200 QPS) the 50x becomes .000X.

4. If there is any sudden spike to popularity, you are screwed. you will end up paying several thousand $ per month.

But see, none of that is true. Everything you just said is misleading at best and completely false at worse. Especially the part about the free tier. This isn’t the 12 month free trial, this is the “free forever”. Sure prices can change but they can change for servers too. That’s no different, and you can’t waste time/effort trying to engineer a solution for a problem that doesn’t yet exist and may never exist.

I think I’ve heard enough to say you have no idea what you’re talking about and this conversation has become pointless.