I have toy site that gets around 100k users a month, with background services like a postgres db... and it costs me under $20 to run. I do everything in CloudRun (serverless) with a managed DB. What in the hell is this person doing?
In all seriousness, running a blog that relies on serverless invocations would guarantee I’d do everything I could to avoid anything popular in case I had to pay out of pocket for a huge traffic surge.
This blog has seen 14,000 views today, but some of the other pages are ~38-40k views
So if you assume ~990KB average page size, 30k views, and he were to post once a day, then that is $78/mo in bandwidth costs assuming 9c/GB. Maybe people tend to click around to the homepage / old articles, or refresh the page a few times?
I'm at a point in my life where for non-core activities/interests, I'd rather / more easily spend $100 to have a turnkey, than $20 but spend 10 hours :-/
(understanding that the author's reasoning is wildly different of course)
When you're feeling comfortable, buy a domain and set up LetsEncrypt for SSL. If you've found a limitation in the VM provider, consider moving to a different one. Consider whether a CDN is the right thing for you.
Email: $5-$10 FastMail plan, up to 16k emails a day
VM: If you manage to spend $120 here, you've fucked up somehow since you're hosting a static site with a like button.
As another comment pointed out, he uses ConvertKit for the newsletter, which can cost up to $59 per month for up to 1k subscribers[1]. If he has 10k, the cost would be way higher.