> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate

Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)

I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high.

I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.

Database costs are very high.

I am not sure I know the reason behind it honestly.

Either you go with something like Dynamodb or planetscale or the least you pay is 40€/m using AWS Aurora serverless.

As soon as databases start to charge for computing time the cost balloon out of reach of hobby projects.

Because the alternative, self hosting, is labor intensive and requires experience.

RDS is very expensive. Just following the console's advise for production instances (meaning Multi-AZ with a Proxy), a t3-medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) Postgres instance with 5GB storage is $130/month.

You can get it down to $12/month by going with a t4g.micro (2 vCPU, 1GB RAM), single-az, no proxy, no backups, 5GB storage; with price after that scaling roughly linearly with RAM. But the interface will scream at you the entire time that this isn't reasonable for a production setup.

Ah, it makes sense why costs would be high in that case. Multi-AZ + proxy seems like massive overkill for 99% of applications though.

We thought that at the SaaS I’m working at but AWS scheduled maintenance in our AZ and that led to significant downtime with nothing we could do about it, no compensation, nada. It was basically our fault because we didn’t use multi-AZ. I can’t remember if this was RDS or ECS but we figured if it could happen to one critical service in a single AZ, it could happen to another.

I think Proxy _is_ overkill and perhaps expensive for what it is. For a pg install, running pgBouncer isn’t difficult. But I guess that depends on whether you’re authenticating with IAMs, which doesn’t sound trivial with bouncer (it might be).

Multi-AZ is freaking awesome because the literal first 10 minutes I'm forced to give a shit about my RDS DB, its already a waste of money vs the monthly cost.

Or just rent a bare-metal server with 32 real cpus and 128gb of ram for <100 bucks a month... My bare metal k8s cluster running on rented bare-metal costs <300 a month and I have hundreds of cores and hundreds of gb of ram available.

Where do you get servers in the US at that price?

OVH has them in North America. You can get 32 threads (16 cores) and 32 gb of ram for 100 euro a month (120ish USD).

Yeah and maintain and monitor it yourself when you could be building the product

Is it really that hard to install netdata? It's a single command.

It is really no different than managing VPS's, in all honesty (just less expensive and tangible). I spend less than one hour a week doing updates and routine maintenance. Drive failures happen rarely, and can usually be swapped out within a few hours (this is what RAID is for).

More time is spent dealing with k8s and it's shenanigans than dealing with the actual servers.

> It is really no different than managing VPS

Many people don't do that. My company uses EKS and we just send dockerfiles and yaml files at it. We don't ever actually interface with an ssh prompt on our servers

Managing Kubernetes doesn't take time?

They could be over-provisioned. AWS does provide recommendations if you are though.

Welcome to the cloud dystopia.

I'm so thankful my career as a developer and sysadmin preceded the cloud era. We now have a whole generation who manage cloud infrastructure but have never setup a Linux server from scratch.

I've gone through both eras and hope I never have to configure a switch or see a HP iLO ever again. Cloud ftw, imo.

I am sure there are numerous services costing $5-10/mo that would cover this and I would certainly consider that to eliminate the hosting and maintenance cost.

If I had to build it, I would expect using Lambda, DynamoDb and S3 would likely bring the hosting cost to down to a couple of a dollars a month max.

Well, it is high, when everything could be run on a $5 VPS with higher availability, less complexity, faster backups and simpler deploys.

We're much more than a hosted email list. We field over a million requests on a normal day.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say? I have no idea what your 1M requests are doing. They could be 1M requests for static HTML. It does make the monthly costs seem a bit more understandable, but 1M/24hrs is still only ~12 RPS.

Btw my comment wasn't an insult, "hosted email list" genuinely seems like the primary functionality and I wouldn't have expected it to use many resources.