Your serverless bill just made you question your life choices. Welcome to the club.
Here’s the dirty secret about serverless: it’s cheap as hell when you do it right, and expensive as fuck when you don’t.
The “I’m bleeding money” starter pack:
Lambda functions that run for 14 minutes and 59 seconds. Congratulations, you’ve invented the world’s most expensive cron job. 1
API Gateway with no caching. Every request hits your Lambda. Every. Single. One. Your wallet is crying. 2
DynamoDB with provisioned capacity set to “whatever the console suggested.” Spoiler alert: the console wants your money.
The “I’m actually smart about this” approach:
Use Lambda’s ARM-based Graviton processors. Same performance, 20% cheaper. It’s literally free money. 3
Set up DynamoDB auto-scaling or go on-demand. Stop paying for capacity you’re not using at 3am. 4
Cache everything at API Gateway. That $0.0000002 per request adds up when you’re doing millions of them. 2
Pro cheapskate moves:
EventBridge is cheaper than Lambda for simple routing. Stop using Lambda as a glorified if/else statement. 5
S3 event notifications are free. Lambda invocations from S3? Standard pricing applies, but no extra notification fees. Use this. 6
CloudWatch Logs cost money to store. Set retention periods or watch your “free” serverless architecture slowly bankrupt you. 7
The nuclear option:
Compute Savings Plans for Lambda. Commit to consistent usage and save up to 17% on compute costs. It’s like reserved instances, but for serverless. 8
Serverless isn’t about spending less money. It’s about spending money more efficiently.
There’s a difference, and your bank account knows it.
Generated by Amazon Q (Claude Sonnet 4.5) - because even AI assistants have opinions about your AWS bill.
The AntFarm
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