Technical
Serverless Economics: What a Year of Free Tier Running Actually Costs
Three production platforms. Eleven months on the AWS free tier. Published monthly invoices. Here is what the honest cost of serverless looked like.
The Headline Number
Total AWS spend across three platforms over eleven months: 67 USD. That is 6 USD per month averaged across all three. The free tier genuinely works if you design for it.
What Stayed Free
Lambda invocations. I stayed well below 1M free invocations per month across all platforms combined. My peak month was 340k.
DynamoDB reads and writes. Single-table design, GSI discipline, and caching kept me under the 25 WCU and 25 RCU free tier.
CloudWatch logs up to 5 GB ingested. I had to implement log retention policies to stay under.
What Cost Money
SES sending: 0.10 USD per 1000 emails beyond the free tier. Newsletters push this up during launches.
Route53 hosted zones: 0.50 USD per zone per month. Small but predictable.
API Gateway calls beyond free tier: minor, but predictable at 3.50 USD per million.
Outbound data transfer: 0.09 USD per GB beyond the free 100 GB per month.
Where I Nearly Blew The Budget
A runaway Lambda that kept retrying a failing DynamoDB call. In one day it ate 40 percent of my monthly budget before a CloudWatch alarm fired. The fix was a simple circuit breaker. The lesson was that free tier protection requires budget alarms, not just design discipline.
The Bill Shape That Surprised Me
Storage costs are not scary. Compute costs are not scary. Data transfer costs sneak up on you. Especially if you have APIs returning large JSON payloads to many clients. Pagination and response compression paid for themselves.
What I Would Do Differently
Set budget alarms at 50, 80, and 100 percent of target from day one Enable S3 intelligent tiering by default Compress API responses from day one Log retention policy set before writing the first log line Cache aggressively at CloudFront for anything static-ish
Monthly budget alarm setup
aws budgets create-budget --account-id ... --budget file://budget.jsonReading
AWS Free Tier docs are specific and worth reading before you start. Most free tier mistakes are documentation mistakes.
Serverless is cheap if you design for it. Serverless is expensive if you do not.
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