Cost lab: Food delivery in 3 Indian cities

Catalogue

Compute

$3,539 a month

What runs your code.

Kind

Server size

How you pay

Reserved: a 1-year commitment, cheaper, paid all month. Spot: spare capacity, can be taken back with 2 minutes notice.

How many servers you run

Scaling

Fixed: the same number all month. Autoscale: follows the load, billed on the average (plus slack).

Spread across two zonesSurvives losing a zone. Adds a second NAT gateway and traffic between zones.

Database

$1,418 a month

Where the data lives.

Kind

Size

Rated for reads and writes per second; a write costs three times a read.

Multi-AZ standbyA second copy in another zone with automatic failover. Doubles the instance price.

Read replicas

Copies that answer reads. They do not take writes and do not fail over automatically.

How you pay

Cache

$0.00 a month

Memory in front of the database (Valkey).

Nodes

More memory holds more of what is read again and again.

Storage and delivery

$1,509 a month

Files, bytes out to users, and what answers them.

CDN in front (CloudFront)Answers cacheable requests at the edge. In India it costs about the same per GB as your own egress, and it bills every request.Resize and re-encode images on uploadSmaller files to send. A function runs once per upload; resized copies add about 15% storage.

Storage class

Infrequent Access is cheaper to keep and charges $0.01 per GB read back. Only objects nobody read for a month are moved.

Logs and monitoring

$847.53 a month

Needs to be kept at least 30 days.

Retention (days)

Sample routine log linesKeep every warning and error; keep 1 in 10 of the info and debug lines.

Monthly bill

$7,357

₹6,98,955 at ₹95 per $

Budget

$2,575

₹2,44,625

Monthly bill $7,357 (budget $2,575) · meets peak ✓ · availability ✓

$4,782 over budget, requirements met.

Checks

Handles the peakpassed

At peak 833 requests/s reach your servers (60 ms of CPU each, run at 60% load) = 83.3 vCPU. That is 21 x m6i.xlarge; you allow 24. At peak the primary does 185 writes/s (x3 weight) + 2,500 reads/s = 3,056 units; a db.m6g.2xlarge is rated 4,800, so 3,360 at 70% load.

Availability: 99.95% (survives a zone loss)passed

Servers in two zones, a standby database, no all-Spot fleet.

Latency: p99 under 300 mspassed

No cold starts on the request path, and reads come from memory where it matters.

Logs kept at least 30 dayspassed

Retention is 180 days.

The choices fit the workloadpassed

Nothing in the design contradicts the workload.

Within budget ($2,575 a month)failed

$4,782 over budget.

The bill, line by line

Compute

$3,539

m6i.xlarge servers, on-demand$3,539
24 x m6i.xlarge x $0.202/h x 730 h = $3,539

Database

$1,418

PostgreSQL primary (db.m6g.2xlarge Multi-AZ)$1,320
db.m6g.2xlarge x $1.81/h x 730 h = $1,320
Database storage (gp3)$98.25
375 GB (data + 25% room) x $0.262 = $98.25

Storage

$70.20

Object storage (Standard)$51.20
2,048 GB x $0.025 = $51.20
Object requests$19.00
600K PUT x $0.000005 + 40M GET x $0.0000004 = $19.00

Monitoring

$847.53

Logs ingested$670.00
1,000 GB x $0.67 = $670.00
Logs stored (180 days)$177.53
1,000 GB x 180 / 30.4 days = 5,918 GB x $0.03 = $177.53

Network

$1,483

Load balancer$43.73
730 h x ($0.0239 + 4.5 LCU x $0.008) = $43.73
LCU: the larger of new connections (25 a second) or 1 GB an hour.
Internet egress$1,439
10,240 GB x $0.1093 + 3,760 GB x $0.085 = $1,439

Mumbai (ap-south-1), 730 hours a month. List prices checked 2026-10-19: the price table below has the sources and what is left out.

Catalogue

Compute

Database

Cache

Storage and delivery

Logs and monitoring

Checks

The bill, line by line

Compute

Database

Storage

Monitoring

Network

Where the prices come from