[araes]

We're almost getting back to the .com era of the 2000's with some of these "public cloud" company demos. Enough frenzy, that if your app really starts grinding compute cycles you can quickly DDOS yourself with server costs. Even at $0.001/request [1], if you get 10,000 HN readers who all make 100 requests on average, you suddenly get $1000 server bill from somebody. Those used to be on /. all the time circa 2000.

If few convert, and most just tell their friends to try your cool demo, you can suddenly have 100,000 reddit users making 200+ requests on average every day cause your free demo's so cool. And suddenly you're mostly trying to figure out how to scrounge up server costs to cover the free parts.

Frankly, seems like the entire industry's probably going to have a lot of the same optimizations pretty soon. "How do we stop delivering such enormous JPGs with every Amazon/eBay click?" and similar.

[1] Slighly old article, so I lower the $/request on compute a bit from $0.0014 to $0.001. https://a16z.com/navigating-the-high-cost-of-ai-compute/