—
per month—request cost
—compute (GB-s)
—per year
GB-seconds punish fat, slow functions
Serverless rewards small memory and fast execution; over-provisioning quietly doubles the bill. Trim both. For constant load compare the container hosting calculator.
Reading a serverless bill before it exists
Lambda-style pricing multiplies three inputs: requests ($0.20/million), GB-seconds of compute (~$0.0000167), and — the one people forget — everything around the function: API Gateway ($1+/million requests, often costing more than the Lambda it fronts), CloudWatch log ingestion, and cross-AZ data transfer. A 512MB function running 200ms a million times costs about $1.87 in compute; the gateway in front of it costs $1–$3.50. Serverless is cheapest for spiky, low-duty-cycle loads; past roughly 30–40% sustained utilization, a small container on a fixed VM undercuts it.