Their setup is trivial - they could do it at 0.2% of revenue with a cheap vps on Linode or other...
Lightsail has pretty comparable pricing to Linode. I'm sure they could re-architect their app to use fewer instances, but they could do that and stay on Lightsail as well.
Moving to linode isn't going to give them a 90% savings.
It's actually incredibly complicated and often very difficult (if not impossible) to predict. We have a dedicated part of our organisation which exists solely to figure out costs ahead of time for project.
I'm not sure if it's intentionally obfuscated, I would suspect not, because "pay for what you use" can be broken down into many areas.
It absolutely is a strategic choice and not an accident.
It's actually incredibly complicated and often very
difficult (if not impossible) to predict.
Lightsail and digital ocean give you 1TB egress minimum included in billing. Now try to input that number into EC2 instance. If I am not wrong, that turns out to be 130$ approx
This bandwidth pricing is very interesting because if you have apps that ship a lot of bytes, you can just run like haproxy on lightsail and get those bytes very very cheap instead of paying standard egress data pricing at like 9 cents per gig...
Does this work? It seems like using lightsail is a way to drastically reduce egress data pricing??? It's like a free lunch, what's the catch?
While this is true, we wanted to go with AWS for 2 primary reasons
1. We use some of the other services provided by AWS like s3 and Route53.
2. Just the reliability and brand that AWS has is something that we had to take into consideration
No, Lightsail doesn't use Graviton2 powered instances today.