Using your numbers and current Lambda prices:

5M GB-seconds * $0.00001667/GB-sec = $83.35

(5,000,000 * 0.00001667 = 83.35)

2400M function invocations * $0.2/million = $480

(2400 * 0.2 = 480)

total = $480 + $83.35 = $563.35/month, which is nowhere close to $17k/mo. I have no idea how you got that number.

I also find it highly unlikely that most businesses are servicing 2.4B requests per month on their API. In my opinion, you either have to be an absolutely enormous monster of a business or have a really unusual business model to be at that level of utilization and not be huge.

Whatever your business, you're unlikely to be spending $10/mo in resources to service nearly 30 billion requests per year. You're probably going to need more than $10/mo just to store the access logs for your API, let alone useful customer data!

In reality, a lot of entire businesses would be much lower in utilization than that. The downsides of a single DigitalOcean droplet are many: a single point of failure, and you'll never achieve high availability if you apply updates regularly and reboot, unless you have multiple $10/mo droplets and a load balancer. You'll also have high latency to customers outside of your region of the world, unless you run a HA-cluster of multiple droplets in each regional datacenter that you care about. Call it three droplets per region and we'll say you want to run them in five regions, so that's $150/mo just in droplets alone, plus a $10/mo load balancer per region, so $200/mo. Did I mention that you or your engineers are going to be responsible for doing the maintenance and replication across regions? Surely the number of engineering hours devoted to this upkeep will be worth more than $350/mo. Huh, I guess we just justified Lambda's costs.

And again, I never claimed this was some kind of snake oil magical solution.

I don't know why you think I'm opposed to the DigitalOcean solution and some sort of salesman for Lambda. I use DigitalOcean heavily for my personal stuff, and I almost never use Lambda, even though I like the idea. You've created a strawman, and you're trying to expertly knock it down... except for the whole math thing as noted above.

If we really dig into this, neither the DigitalOcean solution nor the Lambda solution discussed accounts for the cost of running your stateful infrastructure, whether it's a traditional RDBMS, some NoSQL system, Kafka, or just a giant object store like S3.

My singular point in this entire thread was that scale-to-zero is worthless if the solution that enables scale-to-zero costs more than not scaling to zero. If DigitalOcean is the solution that costs less than scaling to zero, then obviously that is more valuable than the solution that scales to zero.