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

> 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'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.

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!