[SeoxyS]

While by no means insignificant, this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post. I wouldn't be surprised if most startups beat this regularly.

The startup whose backend I co-created racks up an AWS bill that hovers around a half million dollars a month. We make use of all of the ways to save with Amazon: pre-paid reserved instances, negotiated deals, etc. And we're not even that big; imagine what Netflix's AWS bill must cost?

We've tried other providers, toyed with co-locating, but at the end of the day the flexibility and cost benefit of IaaS outweighed the lower base price of CPU cycles when you roll it yourself.

[twotwotwo]

> this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post.

Can only guess at why folks like any post, but it's not necessarily how large the bill is. Maybe it's how low it is for a service that's widely relied on, or maybe it's the level of transparency, which turned out to include evanphx above showing up to answer questions about the project.

[matthewrudy]

Absolutely, this is a transparency thing.

Compared to npm asking for $300,000 in donations to keep the thing running. I'm glad RubyGems can run for relatively so little, and be transparent in doing so.