Hey, it’s Lefteris 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “The Cloud Engineers.”
You went serverless. API Gateway in front of Lambda, clean architecture, no servers to manage. It felt great at 10,000 requests a day. Then your product grew, and now you’re staring at a $2,000/month API Gateway bill wondering what happened.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: API Gateway’s pricing model has a scaling cliff that nobody talks about during the honeymoon phase.
The Math That Changes Everything
API Gateway REST APIs charge $3.50 per million requests (after the first 333 million/month, it drops slightly). Sounds cheap in isolation. Let’s do the math for a moderately successful API:
50 million requests/month
API Gateway cost: ~$175/month
Now the same traffic through an Application Load Balancer:
ALB fixed cost: ~$22/month (base + LCUs)
Per-request component: negligible at this scale
That’s already an 8x…
