Admittedly in this case I'm mostly just trying to push Gatsby to it's limits. For a photography site, there ends up being very little overhead with a static site (if you can do incremental builds). I also explored NextJS (SSR) and just making a good old SPA, but decided to go with Gatsby because at the end of the day, a distinct majority of the storage cost is just the raw images. I think Gatsby ends up making the most sense because you get to take advantage of a CDn for caching (most don't like being used just as an asset cache) and I can just leave it there without worrying about a server.