Reducing Bills by 5X, Latency by 8X

The Awakening

That moment when you check your AWS bill and realize you're paying $30/month to host a website with one blog post and a profile picture? Yeah. That was me.

Here's the breakdown

RDS (PostgreSQL): $14.11/month to store approximately 3 rows of data
App Runner: $10.49/month to serve maybe 10 visitors a day
The rest (S3, CloudFront, Route53): ~$5/month

I was essentially paying $1/row/week.

The Plan

The plan was simple: replace the expensive AWS services with a cheap VPS and call it a day. The execution was not.

Attempt 1: Hetzner Cloud

Everyone on the internet swears by Hetzner, and for good reason — €3/month for a VPS, best price-performance ratio out there. But what I didn't know was

Every single CX and CAX instance was sold out. Everywhere.

Nuremberg, Helsinki, Falkenstein; all gone.

Attempt 2: Fly.io

Fly.io has a generous free tier! — my AI assistant told me calmly.

The free tier turned out to be a 2-hour trial. Two hours. That's not a free tier, that's a demo. And the actual pricing? $20/month for a modest setup. That's worse than what I was already paying.

Railway looked promising with its $5/month hobby plan. But the fine print reveals it's usage-based pricing with a $5 credit. After doing the math: $0.00023/vCPU/sec doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by "always on" as it worked out to about $10-15/month.

Also I don't know what it is with companies always trying to play it down with stuff like /vCPU/sec. Just give me an hourly price or a monthly price. Easy.

Attempt 4: Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud has an always-free tier with 4 ARM cores and 24GB RAM.

Wait, what? Free? Forever? 24GB of RAM?

Turns out Oracle is basically giving away servers like a desperate ex trying to win you back. The catch is that their signup process rejects half of all attempts.

I decided not to gamble on Oracle's signup roulette.

The Winner: Vultr

$5/month.

1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD. Available. Done. No drama.

Also, the server lives in my own city.

The Migration

PostgreSQL → SQLite

The most satisfying part was deleting database infrastructure. My entire dataset — one post, a few tags, and a profile image reference did not need a managed PostgreSQL instance with multi-AZ failover and automated backups.

SQLite is just a file. No connection strings with SSL certificates, no VPC configurations, no security groups. Just file:/path/to/app.db.

The Prisma migration was straightforward, except SQLite doesn't support array types. A minor indignity.

AWS App Runner → Node.js on a VPS

Replaced a managed container service with just

node build

The server setup is now beautifully simple:

Nginx as a reverse proxy
systemd to keep the app running
UFW for the firewall
Total memory usage: ~23MB

The Purge

The most satisfying terraform plan output I've ever seen:

Plan: 0 to add, 1 to change, 23 to destroy.

23 resources destroyed. VPC, subnets, security groups, RDS, App Runner, ECR, IAM roles, SSM parameters — all of it. The only change was pointing CloudFront to the VPS instead of App Runner.

Result

	Before	After
Monthly cost	~$30	~$6
Compute	App Runner (1 vCPU, 2GB)	Vultr VPS (1 vCPU, 1GB)
Database	RDS PostgreSQL	SQLite file
Infrastructure	23 AWS resources	1 VPS + S3/CloudFront
Memory usage	2GB allocated	1GB allocated

The site also loads way faster (remember the server being located in my own city? Yup, that did the trick). But now my wallet is happier and I have one fewer reason to dread the first of the month.

Lessons Learned

Managed services are for managing scale, not managing a blog. If your database has fewer rows than your Terraform files, you've over-engineered it.
Free tier is the most overloaded term in cloud computing. Always check whether free means free forever, free for 12 months, or free for 2 hours.
SQLite is underrated. It's not just for prototyping — it's genuinely the right database for low-traffic sites.
A $6 VPS can do what $30 of managed services does, if you're willing to run apt install nginx yourself.
Always check server availability before getting excited about pricing. RIP Hetzner dreams.

Disclaimer

Parts of this were written by a 🤖, but all of it has been read, edited, and validated by a 🧬
All prices are post-tax