Why Not Stay Local?
Running your backend locally might seem cost-effective at first, but the long-term risks stack up. We face limited scalability, security liabilities, and manual maintenance. Cloud offers built-in resilience and scalability.
For learning purposes, I create backend for my website locally but definitely scale up to AWS or Azure. The issue: AWS have charged me $33/month for no usage at all, so I have to be fully in charge of billing.
1. For Learning & Small Projects (Most likely your current stage)
You can start with $0 - $50/month — seriously.
Free Tiers Available (good for testing and light development):
| Provider | Free Monthly Usage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | 750 hours t2.micro + 5GB S3 | Free for 12 months |
| Google Cloud | $300 credits for 90 days + Always-Free tier | Includes small VM, BigQuery, and 5GB storage |
| Azure | $200 credits + free services for 12 months | Similar to AWS |
| Render / Railway / Replit | Free hobby-tier hosting | Good for APIs, web apps |
Use these to test deployments, learn DevOps, and get used to cloud workflows.
Real Example for a Basic Web App + API + DB:
| Item | Service | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| VM (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) | Digital Ocean, Droplet | $5-$10 |
| Managed DB | Railway / Supabase | $10–$25 |
| Backup storage | S3/Cloud Storage | $1–$5 |
| Domain name | Namecheap / Google Domains / GoDaddy | $20/year |
➡️ Total: $20–$80/month
💼 2. For Ongoing Small-to-Mid Projects (Solo Devs, Freelancers, Prototypes)
Expect to spend $20–$150/month:
- Small VM: $5–$20/mo (e.g., DigitalOcean, Linode, Lightsail)
- Storage (S3/Cloud Storage): $0.02/GB/mo
- Database (PostgreSQL, MySQL managed): $15–$50/mo
- Bandwidth: $0.09/GB (depends on provider)
This level gives you stable hosting, scheduled backups, monitoring, and room to grow.
🏗️ 3. For Scalable Production Systems (Startups, SaaS, APIs, etc.)
- $500–$2,000/month to start
- Auto-scaling compute, load balancers, CI/CD pipelines, caching layers
- Add-on services (message queues, AI APIs, analytics, observability)
🔧 You Can Optimize Costs By:
- Using spot/preemptible instances
- Turning off instances when idle
- Offloading storage to free platforms (e.g., GitHub, Hugging Face Spaces for ML models)
- Using Terraform or infrastructure-as-code to quickly spin down resources
💰 Cloud Cost Estimation for 40,000 Users/Month
| Component | Example Services | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Compute (Web/API Servers) | Autoscaling VMs or Containers (2–4 small/medium) | $80–$250 |
| Database (Managed SQL) | PostgreSQL/MySQL (2–4 vCPU, 8–16GB RAM) | $100–$300 |
| Storage | 100–250 GB (User Data, Backups, Logs) | $5–$25 |
| Bandwidth | 150–300 GB Outbound | $15–$40 |
| CDN / Caching Layer | Cloudflare, Fastly | $0–$50 |
| Load Balancer | AWS ALB, GCP LB | $18–$50 |
| Monitoring/Alerting | Datadog, Grafana | $10–$50 |
| Domain, SSL, DNS | Cloudflare + Namecheap | $1–$3 |
| DevOps / CI/CD | GitHub Actions, CircleCI | $0–$20 |
💡 Total Estimate: $250–$800/month
Barebones setup: $250–$400
Robust, production-ready: $500–$800
High-end or with advanced services: $1,000+/mo
Barebones setup: $250–$400
Robust, production-ready: $500–$800
High-end or with advanced services: $1,000+/mo
🧱 Optional Add-Ons
| Feature | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Redis / Caching | $20–$100 |
| Object Storage (S3, R2) | $0.02/GB |
| Queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ) | $30–$100 |
| Serverless Functions | $0.40/million requests |
| Email/SMS Notifications | $0.001–$0.02/message |
| Data Warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake) | $200+/month |
🔍 Note: 40,000 monthly users is mid-scale. Prioritize autoscaling, redundancy, and backups.
Start lean, scale smart. Efficiency beats bloat every time.
Start lean, scale smart. Efficiency beats bloat every time.