{"slug": "how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month", "title": "How I run a full AWS-powered website for less than $1/month", "summary": "A developer has built HomeServerLab, a free AWS learning platform with an AI assistant, tutorials, OAuth login, and an Apps Marketplace, for less than $1 per month in infrastructure costs. The platform runs on AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and Amazon Bedrock's Nova Micro model, with Cloudflare's free plan and CloudFront's free tier handling most traffic and caching. The key insight is that serverless pricing and free tiers keep costs negligible at low traffic levels.", "body_md": "Most developers assume running a real web platform on AWS costs a fortune. Mine doesn't.\n\nHomeServerLab — 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.\n\nThe stack and what it costs\n\nAWS Lambda\n\nEvery 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.\n\nAPI Gateway HTTP API\n\nThe 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.\n\nDynamoDB\n\nHandles 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.\n\nAmazon Bedrock (Nova Micro)\n\nPowers 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.\n\nCloudflare (Free plan)\n\nSits 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.\n\nCloudFront (Free tier)\n\nSits between Cloudflare and Lambda as an additional layer. 1TB of data transfer and 10 million requests/month free. More than enough.\n\nThe real cost\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe key insight\n\nServerless 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.\n\nIf you want to explore what I built:\n\n[Site](//homeserverlab.org)\n\n[AI](//homeserverlab.org/ai)\n\n[Tutorials](//homeserverlab.org/tutorials)\n\n[Apps Marketplace](//homeserverlab.org/apps)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/tomascody-web333/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1month-313a", "published_at": "2026-08-21 15:28:28+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 15:45:30.564543+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["AWS", "Lambda", "API Gateway", "DynamoDB", "Amazon Bedrock", "Nova Micro", "Cloudflare", "CloudFront"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-run-a-full-aws-powered-website-for-less-than-1-month.jsonld"}}