I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

At our company we host our web app stack and services in a cloud provider, but we don’t use managed services other than Kubernetes. Then everything on top is open source services and apps we host. It’s a big overhead to setup and maintain but I feel once the learning cost is absorbed one time we have high degree of flexibility and also resiliency against random resources getting added behind the scenes and costing us money. The critical part is to stay on top of config & updates since a lot of the apps won’t update themselves or even report an update is needed, and ending up with a vulnerable dependency may be orders of magnitude worse than 1-5K incidental expense.

> ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

+1

Last year I went to self-hosting and I felt the same. I paid less than USD 2000 for a small laptop that I use as a server plus a home NAS and by my current utilization I got in 3 months the return plus the ownership and flexibility.

I feel like a dinosaur now

for our businesses self hosting we avoid all the bells and whistles extras on platforms like AWS as the billing adds up very very quickly. And besides there are a number of providers that don't have all the bells and whistles of AWS (which we don't use) that are quite frankly 25% of the cost of AWS.

_Learnt_ self-hosting? You mean people this days start from the cloud as a default?

…ah, yeah, right. Damn I’m old.

I've only ever self-hosted. Granted, I'm only running a website with a few visitors, but I'm just using a cheap raspi, and not spending loads every months for AWS or whatever else people use these days. Plus, its right in my cupboard, and I have full control over it

I'm old and was self hosting 20 years ago, but we're comparing apples to oranges a bit here!

Using AWS for smaller personal projects will always be more expensive and probably less fun.

On the other hand I recently had to run an ML model over hundreds of thousands of media files. I used AWS to launch 100s of GPUs using spot instances and complete the job in a few hours, then just turned it all off and moved on. It cost a few hundred dollars total.

In my mind it's at this kind of scale AWS really makes sense.

Yes, thats why all these services are popping up and earning tons of cash… look at next.js for example.

They lead young devs into their framework and make them believe that the only way to serve their sites is through them, and to pay their extortionate prices…

People are not educated to self host. Everything is run in a “droplet” and just a click away.

On the other hand, for some serverless services, it makes sense to use AWS instead of self-hosting.

I've deployed multiple Lambda for many years and I have yet to pay anything for them given how _generous_ their free tier is.

Nowadays I must be at around ~100 Lambda executions per day and my billing for Lambda is still $0/month.

To achieve something similar with self-hosting it would require me to have a server running 24/7 just to allow my code running when needed.

So, almost as with everything else in tech (and life in general), the idea is to not see AWS or self-hosting as the best tools for everything. Sometimes AWS is better, sometimes self-hosting is.

Having the freedom to pick the best one in each situation is quite nice!