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    How a $12 AWS bill powers a $50k business

    Friend, ever seen this meme about the bloat of VC-backed startups?

    SzYypgjpgchiaa3

    It's a running joke in the industry. Startup gets funded, startup shovels money into the AWS furnace, Bezos gets rich.

    Graybeard sysadmins chuckle.

    "Lulz only five bazillion users?? I could run that from my PC in the basement. These people ... <eyeroll>"

    But it's not always like that. Today, I wanted to talk about my AWS bill. A whopping $12 per month. 😛

    Serverless cost optimization

    Value your time

    That's what an AWS billing expert had to say about optimizing for cost. If your bill is less than $10k/mo, it's not worth optimizing.

    🤯

    He's right. How much is your time worth? What about your focus?

    Would you rather build your project, launch-and-forget, then get back to work ... ooooor spend 20 minutes every other week because your server's down again? I'm sure you like to fret every moment of every day about the alarm that says "Shit's on fire, user can't do the thing"

    That's advanced for a side-project. Usually it's a user that complains on twitter. You had no idea your app's been down for 3 days 😅

    Problems 👉 solved

    I like the launch-and-forget approach.

    yarn deploy, wait 3 minutes, ✅

    Here's what my $12 AWS bill solves:

    • enabling purchases
    • layouting emails
    • reader feedback

    Set them up, never thought about it again. It just works.

    Gumroad hook

    You can do a lot with Zapier integrations, a no-code glue platform, but you can't connect your payments provider to your custom platform.

    For that you need the most impactful JavaScript function I ever wrote. It creates a new user for every purchase.

    Sketch of how the Gumroad hook works
    Sketch of how the Gumroad hook works

    Here's what it does:

    1. User makes a purchase
    2. Gumroad sends POST request to a URL
    3. AWS Gateway routes the request
    4. AWS Lambda wakes up a new server
    5. Server runs 20 lines of JavaScript
    6. Calls API on Auth0
    7. Creates user, if needed
    8. Gives permission to access purchased course

    Took 2 hours to build, never had an outage. Processed ~$50k in revenue, touched only to add new products ✌️

    Newsletter layouting

    As impactful as that was, it's not my favorite. My favorite is the newsletter layouting tool that builds these emails.

    I love markdown. Email software hates markdown. Email clients hate embeds.

    What do you do? Hire an editor for $500/mo. $6000/year right there. For years.

    I loved my editor and he hated this part of his gig.

    Get a text file from Swiz, take a bunch of images, upload to Imgur, put into ConvertKit and into Wordpress. Hit 3 buttons. 🤮

    So I replaced him with a $1/year piece of JavaScript and he got a more rewarding job at a big company.

    TechLetter app being wonderful

    A tool that eats Markdown, converts embeds into screenshots, uploads to S3, searches Giphy for gifs, creates HTML.

    All powered by a screenshot lambda that admittedly took lots of tinkering and updates. It even creates thumbnails for my blog 😁

    But you can throw anything at it!

    Up to 1000 embeds in parallel, all good. Embed breaks the code? No worries, running on a separate server from all others. Chrome hangs? Pfft, start a new one!

    Resilience managed by AWS Lambda. I never need to think about it 😇

    Reader feedback

    Spark Joy widgets
    Spark Joy widgets

    You'll see these under every email, article, and course chapter I create. There's a few variations and they all lead to the same place 👉 a serverless GraphQL API.

    The API wakes up a smol server, saves your feedback to a DynamoDB table, and says thanks.

    Best thing I ever did for my business. So many thoughtful comments 😍

    One of these days I'll rebuild the frontend to look nicer, but the serverless backend is rock solid. Bit of Apollo, dash of custom code, and voila.

    You can do this

    Friend, my point is that running server code on the web has become ridiculously cheap and easy.

    My $12 bill runs all of the above, the biggest cost is serving images from S3 – $5 for hosting, $3 for bandwidth. The smarts running on AWS Lambda are way below the free tier.

    Lambda is free
    Lambda is free

    18,000 requests per month is pretty cool 🚀

    To be fair, I offload frontend web traffic to Netlify and Vercel. A whopping $25/mo ...

    What do you think, got a problem you could solve with a small JavaScript function running in the cloud? Hit reply

    Cheers,
    ~Swizec

    PS: yes you could run all this from your basement for free, but it's no worth your time 😉

    Published on March 9th, 2021 in Serverless, Indiehacking, Technical

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    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

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