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Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).

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Which other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed through a reverse proxy?

Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.

I've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it without being charged per request.

You can, and if you want to use Lambdas, you can also route to them from ALBs, which has a bit confusing of a pricing model for comparison, but has no per-request cost.

Oh, ALBs. Now that's a mess. You'll either be charged per new connection, per concurrent connection, per byte, or per rule evaluation, depending on which is highest any given hour.

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

> Load Balancer Capacity Units

I'm baffled at the complexity of just ELB pricing. Do AWS customers just not care?

Hetzner does not charge for bandwidth anymore starting from half a year-ish(?) ago. Unmetered gigabit.

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