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Predictable or flat/consistent? If my load is negligible in US weekends and outside of business hours, that's a factor of 2 or 3 you can theoretically save over baseline=peak with some "cloud on demand" service.

It's not an order of magnitude, but it's something. Probably not worth the effort, for most, though, and I have no idea if "dedicated box" services can approximate something similar.

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If you have a small number of requests over a large period, serverless is cheaper (that includes an api that is idle most of the time and peaks at a very high rate occasionally).

But once you go live and start to grow, there is a point where the lambda cost equals the instance price. And with an instance, you can almost always do a lot more than that number. Again, that will work if your requests are predictable enough that you can see this number consistently over a large period, say, every week at least.

A dedicated box would for example handle that traffic at all times and still be cheaper. Dedicated servers are 3x+ cheaper.

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