Most developers assume running a real web platform on AWS costs a fortune. Mine doesn't.
HomeServerLab — a free AWS learning platform with an AI assistant, tutorials, OAuth login, and an Apps Marketplace — runs for less than $1/month in infrastructure costs. Here's exactly how.
The stack and what it costs
AWS Lambda
Every route on the site is handled by a single Lambda function written in Python. No EC2, no always-on server, no idle costs. Lambda charges per invocation and per GB-second of compute — at my traffic levels, it stays well within the free tier and costs virtually nothing beyond it.
API Gateway HTTP API
The entry point for all requests. HTTP API is significantly cheaper than REST API on AWS — $1 per million requests. At my current traffic, this rounds to zero.
DynamoDB
Handles rate limiting, user sessions, chat history (with TTL), and OAuth state. On-demand pricing means I pay per read/write, not for provisioned capacity. Again, within free tier at my scale.
Amazon Bedrock (Nova Micro) Powers the built-in AI assistant. Nova Micro is one of the cheapest foundation models available on Bedrock — and with a 25 messages/day rate limit per user, costs stay negligible.
Cloudflare (Free plan) Sits in front of everything: DNS and proxying, CDN and caching (reduces Lambda invocations), WAF and bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and Cloudflare R2 for the Apps Marketplace (10GB free tier). All of this on the free plan — $0/month.
CloudFront (Free tier) Sits between Cloudflare and Lambda as an additional layer. 1TB of data transfer and 10 million requests/month free. More than enough.
The real cost
The only real cost is Bedrock — and even that is minimal with rate limiting in place. Everything else stays within free tiers at my traffic levels. Total: less than $1/month.
The key insight
Serverless means you pay for what you use, not for what you reserve. Combined with Cloudflare's free plan absorbing most of the traffic before it even hits AWS, the actual billable usage is tiny.
If you want to explore what I built:
[Site](//homeserverlab.org)
[AI](//homeserverlab.org/ai)
[Tutorials](//homeserverlab.org/tutorials)
[Apps Marketplace](//homeserverlab.org/apps)