If you're not careful, that could be your website hosting bill for the month.
Imagine it's the year 2024.
You're a human artist whose life work is being devoured and regurgitated by diffusion models.
you build a free website and social network that filters out everything artificial, reminding us of the good times before the rise of the robots.
In just a few weeks, the app becomes a beacon of hope for humanity and grows to over 500,000 users.
It's every developer's dream, but sometimes dreams turn into nightmares.
And that's what happened when Kara got its serverless functions bill from Versailles, 96k and growing by the second.
In today's video, we'll find out how this is even possible.
And we'll check out some amazing videos.
tools that can help you avoid the serverless tax.
It June 7th, 2024, and you're watching the code report.
I feel kind of bad even mentioning the name care.app because every time someone visits there,
it's going to cost the developer another 20 cents.
But this is hardly the first time someone has been surprised by a massive serverless bill.
There's nothing serverless about serverless.
It's just a server that scales automatically, so you don't have to f*** around with Kubernetes.
All big clouds offer serverless functions, so what exactly does Vercel do?
Well, they sell triangles.
And by that, I mean they sell an experience, a developer experience.
Vercel doesn't have its own data centers,
it's just a proxy for AWS and CloudFlare, but optimized for the world's most popular JavaScript framework next year.
Now, I actually went to business school and got really good grades, and what I learned
is that in order for Vercell to make money,
they need to charge you more than AWS charges them, but when it comes to pricing, they follow the art of war.
The whole secret lies in confusing the customer so that he cannot fathom our real intent.
They offer a free hobby tier that burns through cash, but this is the best way to put meat in the seats.
Every 100 customers that fall into this trap, maybe one or two of them will go viral and mature into a profitable customer.
A locked up cash cow with teats for bandwidth CPU time and gigabyte hours.
But this is how all big clouds work and really any developer product with a free tier.
It might be expensive and confusing, but for sales pricing is nothing unusual.
Their closest competitor Netlify, recently went viral when a user got $100,000 bill due to a DDOS attack.
At they offered to split the bill 2080,
but then reduced that down to 5k out of pocket, and eventually waved the bill after it went viral on Hacker News.
DDOS is one thing, but Cara is receiving legitimate traffic, and Vercel responded to their tweet confirming that.
In addition, they sent multiple emails to the customer.
or warning them that the app was blowing up,
and the customer failed to set a budget limit, which would have paused the project after a certain amount of money was spent.
These are mistakes you just cannot make when working with infinitely scaling platforms.
Now the developer has to either monetize quickly or be destined to a life of homelessness.
is a well-established photographer from Singapore,
who's also currently including Google, Stability AI, Mid-Journey, DeviantArt, and Runway AI before infringing on copyrights with their AI tools.
Personally, I think Purcell offers a great product, quite possibly the best triangles
west of the Mississippi, but it's important that every developer knows how their pricing scales.
Heroku used to be the hottest place to deploy web apps, then it was acquired, and shortly after they dropped the free tier.
Every developer should have a self-hosted backup plan,
and in reality, it shouldn't take more than a couple hundred bucks a month on AWS or Hetzner to handle Kara's workload.
Ideally, you have it containerized with Docker and ready to launch anywhere.
And when it comes to infrastructure, tools SST can help you skip the low-level dealers and go straight to Pablo Escobar directly.
I recently started playing around with this open- source tool called Coolify that basically allows you to host your own private resell,
which is a game changer if you have tons of failed side projects to manage.
I recommend subscribing to milky and checking out this video to learn more about it.
I have a hard time admitting this, but I'm addicted to serverless computing myself.
I doing it casually, just a few background functions here and there, but now my entire infrastructure is dependent on serverless.
I'm a functioning serverless aholic, and I need help.
Post good, versatile, or serverless alternatives in the comments below.
If this has been the code report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
