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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

> If "7 full production instance cost $150" then your application is tiny and you don't need 15 AWS services.

Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising.

Sure, if you are talking about dedicated EC2 instances or something, then a $150 “production” instance is tiny. But that’s not the situation here. $150 for developer load on serverless doesn’t correspond to $150 for a full production service.

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>Did you miss that this is oriented around serverless? It doesn’t mean their application is tiny, it just means they can scale down a long way. Which, given that they are using serverless, is unsurprising.

DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora are serverless storage solutions but you still pay for the data you store. It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21. For reference, a few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month.

> few terabytes of data in DynamoDB costs thousands a month

yeah we found out this the hard way. have you found an alterative to this? seems for us the biggest uncertainty is storage space since it is user generated and we have "unlimited" guarantee that we unfortunately need to grandfather.

also curious nobody is talking about this for many small bootstrapped developers, this would be a no go.

the only alternative I can think of is a hetzner dedicated box or a fleet of vps from DO or Vultr with S3 compatible API (not sure if such solution exists ).

Where did they say their production storage costs $21? The $150 bill is for their developer accounts.

> It is highly surprising their total production storage cost is less than ~$21.

You misread. They didn’t say this.

It's still a meaningless number, because there's no reasonable way to map this to production cost.

Why does that make it meaningless? They were describing how much it costs to provision a full environment for each developer. That’s a meaningful number by itself.

have you considered case when developers need to not only clone just AWS infrastructure but storage as pre-requisite? In this scenario you would multiply your storage costs by the total number of developers.

This is a monstrous misassumption by Plain. For instance when I was trying to work with Bitcoin chain data, I would be looking at close to 1TB worth of data that I needed each time to replicate the complete application and the bill was something like $500 just to keep it in EBS.

So with 10 developers, we would be essentially paying somebody's salary and I wonder if the problems listed in this article is so critical that it would be worth that much.

If you do plan to be hosting 1TB of data in EBS for each developer then yes, this approach is probably not right for you and you should adapt it! It's not a one-size fits all approach.

The vast majority of developers don’t need a 1TB working set of data. This isn’t a “monstrous misassumption”, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption for typical cases.

Also, it doesn’t cost anywhere near $500 to keep 1TB in EBS.

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