Serverless is a luxury lifestyle brand for developers. You pay for the "Developer Experience" (DX), but you get robbed on the infrastructure.
We love Vercel's UI. It's beautiful. But their business model is essentially reselling AWS Lambda and Cloudfront with a 500% markup. It works great for hobby projects. It is a death sentence for scaling startups.
1. The Bandwidth Mafia
Let's look at the math. In 2024, data is cheap. You can get 1TB of transfer on a $5 Hetzner VPS.
On the major "PaaS" providers, once you pass the free tier, the cost per GB is astronomical. It is the digital equivalent of buying bottled water at an airport.
INVOICE #0421
2. The Wrapper Trap
"Serverless" functions are just containers that spin up and down rapidly. The provider handles the scaling. That sounds nice, until you realize the trade-off.
Cold Starts: Your users wait 2 seconds for the container to boot.
Time Limits: Your function kills itself after 10 seconds. Long-running jobs? Impossible.
Vendor Lock-in: You start using proprietary features like "Edge Config" or "KV". Now you can't migrate.
THE REALITY CHECK
A $20/month VPS can handle 10x the traffic of a $200/month Serverless bill. The CPU is always on. The RAM is always hot. There are no cold starts.
3. Why We Build "Boring" Infrastructure
Ronin is "boring." We don't have proprietary edge runtimes. We don't have magic middleware.
We give you a Docker container. It runs on a Linux server. It stays running. You pay for the size of the server, not the number of times someone refreshed your page.
Predictable pricing is a feature. Knowing your bill will be exactly $20 next month allows you to sleep. Fearing a viral tweet will bankrupt you does not.
OWN YOUR METAL
Stop renting wrappers. Start owning servers.
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