Highly dependent on your stack but there are plenty of free tiers for most serverless services. E.g. if you're willing to write everything in JS/TS then Vercel is a great option. (Kind of relevant to your post about adapting architecture to cost)
The problem with serverless is that the failure mode for traffic spikes is either "shockingly high bill" or "stops serving requests".
For high, sustained load, a running server is always cheaper, the cost is predictable, and the failure mode is usually "serving requests much more slowly".
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Highly dependent on your stack but there are plenty of free tiers for most serverless services. E.g. if you're willing to write everything in JS/TS then Vercel is a great option. (Kind of relevant to your post about adapting architecture to cost)
The problem with serverless is that the failure mode for traffic spikes is either "shockingly high bill" or "stops serving requests".
For high, sustained load, a running server is always cheaper, the cost is predictable, and the failure mode is usually "serving requests much more slowly".
AWS lambda seems dirt cheap, or am I mistaken?
It's not that hard to accidentally have a huge bill if you get overloaded with requests.