This project is built around wake-on-demand architecture to minimize AWS cost.
Approximate monthly cost if the environment stays online continuously:
- EC2 ASG: $10–15/month
- RDS t3.micro: $12–15/month
- S3 + CloudFront: < $1/month
- Lambda + API GW: negligible (< $0.10)
- SSM Parameters: free (standard tier)
Total always-on ≈ $25–32/month
With autosleep after X minutes:
- EC2 → $0
- RDS → $0 (destroyed)
- Only S3/CF/SSM remain → < $1/month
Each wake event incurs the following operational cost and time:
- GitHub Actions runner time: ~1–2 minutes
- Terraform operations: 3–5 minutes
- AWS service cold starts:
- EC2 ASG instance warm-up: 60–120 seconds
- RDS initialization: 2–4 minutes
- Total wake time: typically 8–15 minutes
(from pressing “Wake” to the application responding over HTTPS)
There is no persistent cost once the idle reaper destroys all resources.
- Destroy infrastructure on inactivity
- Stateless frontend via S3
- OIDC (no permanent IAM users)
- Auto-scaling app layer only during active sessions