Their model may be one of the few that would truly be quite challenging to pull off with bare metal—running sandboxed code for 73 languages is hard to do economically with any setup, but being able to lean on cloud services for provisioning would make it much more achievable.
ah I see that might be a bit more tricky. I was wondering why the costs were so high.
For example, I serve roughly 3 million users on a $40/month VPS. I only run Postgres + Django, if I use Supabase and all these other fancy cloud SaaS I wouldn't be able to sustain it as the costs would increase 10~20x fold.
our postgres offering costs roughly equivalent of RDS so if you use it with Django I don’t think you will come close to 20-40x a VPS, ymmv, depending on your workload
We have an Auth service, but since you use Django you wouldn’t need it - sounds like you’d only need postgres (like a lot of our customers)
I don't think you get the point. RDS is expensive, just because you having pricing parity with it doesn't mean that you are going to be at the same pricing level as cheap hosting.
And thats fine, you have features on top that can be worth paying for certain customers and expenses of your own to pay. Those of us that have been around in this business for 30 years know how expensive PAAS and IAAS can be and how easy it is to roll your own solutions and when not to do that.
True, but I wonder what the cost split is. I'd expect the actual "run code from users" bit to be a minor line item, with the bulk being the actual app servers, databases and egress bandwidth.
They can very well keep the REPL/"run code from users" bit on AWS, but serve their actual website, application and database from fixed-price bare-metal servers.