How much do you spend on cloud costs?

My costs are a few cents a month. Mostly because I use the AWS CDK to develop my IaC which incurs some S3 data transfer costs when I'm deploying a lot. I imagine when I'm not trying to launch an MVP my costs will be $0. I'm building totally serverless on AWS.

In my opinion serverless is a great way to start because you only pay for what you use. Maybe in the future something like Fargate will be better than Lambda from a cost perspective, but for the time being, Lambda is a blessing to me. That being said, be a little careful with AWS. As others have mentioned the costs can balloon if you don't know what you're doing. The only reason I went with it is because I work with AWS everything in my full-time job.

I'd be happy to help you figure out infrastructure or architecture or explain mine if you are interested.

That is going to be a hard one to answer. All startups are different, and so is the technology stack as well as how it is implemented.

If your project is small it might fit within the free tier at AWS and you'll have no cost.

Maybe you can go full serverless and the cost will scale with use.

Some projects, on the other hand, require server infrastructure to be online 24x7x365. These are going to cost more. It still isn't much. In my experience, you can buy a lot of resources for under $100/month

I think developers like to go overboard and then easily spend a lot on startup with 1 customer and no traffic. I would go step by step, starting from a small cheap virtual machine, and offloading things to other VMs or managed services as I go.

Do you need K8s from the start? Or will you need it in 3 years? Those 3 years might mean simple and cheap hosting, while focusing more on the application and finding a product market fit.

For the ideas I had in my head, I would probably never spend more than $100 for several years. Some startups might need more power/storage/whatever, of course.

In addition to free tiers, the big providers (AWS, Google Cloud, presumably Azure) all have some sort of startup/small-biz programs you can look into and apply for. We've got so many AWS credits that we haven't paid anything for over a year, despite running a production service that's dependent on AWS services. To be fair, some of our more expensive web services aren't on AWS, so we're still spending money.

Cloud services are notorious for becoming surprisingly expensive, since the blessing and curse side of metered billing is that price scales as use does. There are so many good services out there these days that use flat or tiered billing instead, at really good rates, that I'd probably reach for those first.

All that said, depending on the details of your service, how efficiently things are implemented, how reliable and secure you need them to be, and what you can get away with for your developer experience, you can go incredibly far with your dollar with raw cloud services. As soon as you get into compute-heavy or bandwidth-heavy applications, though, costs really start to balloon! It's really all about the details.

The bulk of our costs aren't even raw resource use by our users. It's mostly from things designed to maximize stability of the services, prepare for disaster recovery, and provide good developer experience. For example, most of our costs come from:

• Needing multiple environments (for safe, staged deployments)
• Ensuring scalability (e.g. by having load balancers and multiple instances per deployment, despite not needing that much in the way of resources)
• Having earlier deployment stages exactly match later ones despite them not needing NEARLY as much resources (to ensure environments match as closely as possible)
• Having continuous database backups instead of less frequent snapshots (that's where most of our database costs come from!)
• Having telemetry services for discovering issues

All of that is stuff we developed over time, as we moved from being time-rich & money-poor to the opposite. At the very beginning when we had nothing, I was able to run all of our web infrastructure for something like $80/month at peak use! We leaned really hard on free and cheap services, with the idea that if we needed something better as success came along we could buy/build those things with new resources.