Edge & Serverless

You went serverless to stop paying for idle compute. It worked — your Vercel functions cost nothing at zero traffic. But your RDS instance is still running 24/7 at $50+/mo whether anyone visits or not. ElastiCache: $15/mo minimum. The database is now the expensive part of your "serverless" stack.

Upstash gets close with per-request pricing, but that can spike unpredictably on traffic bursts. Neon scales to zero but takes seconds to cold-start. PlanetScale charges a $39/mo minimum. None of them actually match the economics of "pay nothing when idle."

Idle databases archive to cloud storage at $0.20/GB/mo. When a request hits your function, the database wakes in milliseconds and serves from NVMe. You don't pay for an always-on instance, and there's no minimum monthly spend.

• → Idle = archived = $0.20/GB. Not $50/mo. Not $15/mo. Pennies.
• → HTTP API for edge runtimes — no persistent TCP connections needed
• → Wake time: milliseconds from NVMe, low seconds from cloud storage
• → Pay per storage, not per request — no surprise bills from a traffic spike
• → Works with Lambda, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy

You have a side project that gets 100 visitors a day. Vercel bill: $0. Domain: $12/yr. Database on RDS: $50/mo — $600/yr for something that's idle 99.9% of the time.

Same project on Cinch with 500MB of data: the database sleeps between visits, wakes on request, costs ~$0.10/mo. Your database bill becomes a rounding error, like the rest of your serverless stack.