Hi fpgaminer,

The post is intended to analyze spend of running on AWS, your point about comparing other cloud services are completely valid but out of scope for the post.

The $20 per month is for 1,000 sessions per day after 1 year. I assume that getting 1,000 or 100 users on a daily basis for a whole year is pretty good for an app/service to move over bootstrapping and start generating some revenue or raise some money so that $20 bill seems small. The upside is if you don't go big you don't pay.