* I am using software architecture as a broad term here to encompass DB design, backend architecture, choice of language(s), frontend architecture, framework/middleware choices etc.
A hydraulic model may be between 1-10MB and the simulation results can end up being 100+MB of time series data.
Other vendors with proprietary engines have to scale up servers to run their simulation engineers and will store and serve up results from a database.
Having everything done locally means we only have to store a static file and offload the simulation to the client.
Because we've architected it this way our hosting costs are low and users generally have faster access to results (assuming they're running a moderately decent machine)
I am trying to convince another party to follow that example because they have exceeded their service end point quota on AWS.
In that same application I came to the conclusion that HTTP was too expensive to maintain for various technical reasons specific to the project. I switched to web sockets for everything, which was very challenging, but it completely paid for itself.
Another one is using Heroku (~$7pcm) over Vercel (~$20pcm) for deploying a simple website/CMS for a business (and therefore not eligible for Vercel's free hobby tier). I initially wanted to use Vercel but Heroku is actually fantastic if you're developing solo and don't need all the bells and whistles Vercel provides.
It's sad, but I'd probably rather spend 4 hours migrating to a free-tier serverless environment... rather than pay $5 per month for a dedicated server...