Serverless is great, until it’s not. One infinite loop and you’re bankrupt.

People love to say “serverless means you don’t have to worry about servers.” But someone, somewhere, is definitely worrying about your server and billing you for every millisecond it runs. A small bug or a traffic spike can turn into a big bill fast.

Most cloud providers advertise “pay only for what you use,” but the fine print can be brutal. AWS is especially notorious for surprise S3 bills. Leave a bucket or some logs unchecked and a nasty invoice shows up.

For real stories and nightmares, serverlesshorrors.com is worth a look.

One exception worth mentioning is Cloudflare. Their serverless platform (Workers, Pages, etc.) is solid and genuinely pocket-friendly. No surprise bills, unless you really go wild.

Self-hosting is another route worth considering, especially for things that run predictably and don’t need to scale overnight.