Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Heroku's pricing is wild. About a decade ago I just about fell out of my chair when I found out the startup I was at was burning upwards of $10k/mo just to generate QR codes (made out of html tables so that they would reliably display in emails). It worked out to something like $0.15/code

The lead who wrote it had never even profiled code before, after some changes we cut it down to ~$0.01/per, but that's still insane.

Were you not caching things and using a basic generator? Your comment really doesn't make any sense to me, no offense.

Sounds like they were generating codes with pure html not images.

It still doesn't even make sense to generate a lousy html which costs 0.15 each barcode. It shouldn't even cost 0.0001