Cost analysis
AWS serverless MVP cost.
What an AWS-serverless backend actually costs to run when your MVP has tens to hundreds of users, not millions. The honest answer is much less than most founders fear, but the breakdown matters.
The core services and what they cost
- · Lambda: per-request + per-100ms billing. For a small MVP doing thousands of requests per day, this is usually under $5/month.
- · API Gateway: per-request. HTTP API is roughly 3× cheaper than REST API. A small MVP runs $1–10/month.
- · DynamoDB: on-demand mode bills per read/write unit. For early-stage data volume, $5–20/month is typical.
- · S3 + CloudFront: storage and CDN. A SaaS with a few GB of assets runs $1–5/month.
- · CloudWatch logs and Sentry-equivalent observability: $5–30/month depending on retention.
- · SES for transactional email: $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Effectively free for MVP scale.
What the realistic monthly bill looks like
An AWS-serverless MVP with tens to low hundreds of active users typically runs $20–80/month total. The cost scales with usage, which is why serverless is structurally cheaper than a 24/7 EC2 / RDS setup that bills whether or not anyone is using your app.
Where founders get burned is misconfigured services, e.g. forgetting to set log retention, leaving DynamoDB in provisioned mode at zero traffic, or running NAT Gateways for Lambda VPC access without need. Those are configuration mistakes, not architecture mistakes.
When NOT to choose serverless
When you have predictable steady-state traffic at scale, or when you have a large-binary workload (heavy ML inference, video transcoding) where Lambda's runtime limits hurt. For most early-stage SaaS, neither applies.