No doubt he is smart, but it literally costs so much because he is using extremely expensive tools for that. It's literally static content.

Maybe, but there are a bunch of smart folks here too, and no one can come up with a good reason for this costing $2k/year.

It's possible $166/mo is not enough of a hit on his income so as to be worth spending time optimizing (unlikely considering how little time it'd seemingly take to optimize), or since he works for AWS it could be sponsored (which would mean he has to justify the continued cost to his bosses when they ask about it).

All valid reasons, but not technical ones. Either there's some aspect of implementing this that we're not thinking of, or there are non-technical reasons involved that we're simply unaware of.

That's probably true. I'm paying around 70 USD per month for Azure Functions (an equivalent of AWS Lambda) because they charge like crazy for disk read/writes and my application is quite tiny, definitely could fit on a raspberry pi. But I don't bother to optimize.

You know what else no one here has done? Built something cheaper and posted a link.

> You know what else no one here has done? Built something cheaper and posted a link.

Thousands of people have built that for the past 20+ years without posting a link.

Why would I as a user care to use that instead?

I hear it's expensive! :D

But seriously, someone could probably fork and then convert his existing GitHub repo into a GH page...