How We Took a Hosting Bill from $2.5K to Almost Nothing

A critical element of running your app is hosting. Hosting is the cost of running your app online, which includes the servers, databases, and infrastructure that make it available for your users 24/7.

It’s common for founders to come to us with an existing app that costs thousands of dollars every month to simply keep the lights on.

Recently, we took on a client who was paying USD$2,500 per month for hosting… a huge overhead for an early-stage business that doesn’t have many active users, and isn’t yet generating substantial revenue. For most startups, that kind of spend is not sustainable.

A Better Way

At Devika, we build everything cloud-native and serverless-first. Instead of running costly, always-on servers, serverless technology means you only pay when your app is actually used. Hosting costs drop dramatically without compromising performance or scalability.

Here’s a screenshot of the hosting dashboard for one of our clients. They are in the early stages of onboarding users, and are paying less than $1 per month in hosting fees.

Factors That Impact Hosting Price

Here’s a comparison of the key factors that impacted hosting price for our client:

Hosting – Traditional Infrastructure Hosting – Baseline (modern tech stack)

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Cost per Month USD $2,500 USD $0.47

Servers Always-on, fixed cost regardless of usage No servers to manage. Pay only per request

Scalability Manual upgrades, costly over-provisioning Auto-scales instantly with demand

Development Timeline Longer builds due to infrastructure setup Faster builds (live in ~3 months)

Infrastructure Maintenance Ongoing server patching & monitoring Minimal. AWS manages scaling and uptime

Best For Legacy or enterprise apps with fixed workloads Startups and scale-ups needing lean, flexible infrastructure

Why Baseline Matters

Leveraging our experience building 100+ apps, Devika has developed a tech stack called Baseline, which we use as the foundation of every single project we build. Baseline is fully serverless, AWS-native, and provides up to 6 months worth of software development out of the box. Beyond cutting hosting costs, Baseline also shortens the development timeline, meaning:

• Lower build costs – fewer hours needed to deliver.
• Faster time-to-market – live in as little as three months.
• Stronger foundations – no expensive rebuilds six months later.

The Devika Difference

This is what you get from a tech partner with a proven, established delivery process. With over 100 digital products built, our engineering stack has been refined to minimise waste, maximise speed, and set startups up for long-term scale.

Takeaway

If you’re paying enterprise-level AWS bills before you’ve even reached product-market fit, there’s a better way. With Devika and Baseline, you can launch faster, scale smarter, and spend your capital on growth, not infrastructure.

Worried About Your Hosting Bill?

Contact our team today to see how we can help you do the same.