Serverless is great–until it’s not. One infinite loop and you’re bankrupt!

People love to say “serverless means you don’t have to worry about servers.” But someone, somewhere, is definitely worrying about your server–and billing you for every millisecond it runs. If you’re not careful, a small bug or a traffic spike can turn into a big bill.

Most cloud providers love to advertise “pay only for what you use,” but the fine print can be brutal. AWS is especially notorious for surprise S3 bills–leave a bucket or some logs unchecked, and you might get a nasty invoice.

I’ve seen stories of folks getting surprise invoices, all because a function got stuck or a cloud service didn’t behave as expected. It’s funny until it happens to you.

If you want to see some real-life stories (and nightmares), check out:

One exception I recommend is Cloudflare. Their serverless platform (Workers, Pages, etc.) is great and pocket friendly. I haven’t had any surprise bills there - unless you really go wild.

I’m working on some tutorials about self-hosting and running your own stuff–coming soon!