I think you&#x27;re dramatically underestimating the cost difference between AWS and other providers. Yes, you gain some reliability, but it&#x27;s nowhere close to &quot;basically free&quot;.<p>As a hypothetical example, let&#x27;s say I have an API backend that needs 250ms of CPU to generate a 16KB response, and uses 512MB of memory. I can run this on a $9&#x2F;month VPS [1] and, at full utilization, handle about 21 million requests per month.<p>Handling the same volume of requests on AWS Lambda is not just more expensive, but <i>hugely</i> more expensive. You end up paying about $4 in request charges, $73 for the &quot;request gateway&quot;, $15 for the computation itself, and $30 for bandwidth. That&#x27;s more than 13 times the cost, and I haven&#x27;t even factored in data storage. You could buy two VPSes for fault-tolerance, hugely over-provision both of them, and you&#x27;d <i>still</i> end up spending less money than Lambda.<p>If your application is lightweight enough that even a single VPS is dramatically more than you need, then yeah, Lambda&#x27;s pricing model could save you some of those last few dollars. But if you expect to grow, then you probably don&#x27;t want to lock yourself into an API that will become much more expensive later on.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;hosting&#x2F;produkte_vserver&#x2F;cx20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;hosting&#x2F;produkte_vserver&#x2F;cx20</a>