03 // What it costs
You pay a flat rate whether anyone shows up or not
A fixed monthly fee even when nobody comes. Under a rush the site then slows down or fails. Serverless turns both around.
- ≈ 0 is what zero visitors cost
- auto scaling under peak load
- 8.7 h downtime/year at 99.9%
- 1 base from site to SaaS
Why it’s the model
Classic hosting rents a fixed server share. You pay it the same every month, whether zero visitors come or a thousand. Under a spike that share does not grow with the traffic: response time climbs from 200 to 500 milliseconds to several seconds, and visitors leave. Exactly in the moment that counts, a press mention or a tender in progress.
That is not a question of the provider, the Swiss hosts are good. It is a property of the model: a single server that overloads, plus maintenance windows and the dependence on one data center. 99.9 percent availability sounds like a lot, but it is about 8.7 hours of downtime a year.
How we solve it
Serverless on AWS turns it around. There is no single server to overload, every request is answered distributed across CloudFront. Zero visitors cost almost nothing, a spike scales on its own, without anyone spinning anything up.
The monthly price is the smallest difference here. The big one is that the site stays fast exactly when it counts, and you don’t pay for idle in the quiet times.
You pay for usage, not for idle
- Zero visitors cost almost nothing. You pay by actual usage, not for a rented server that costs the same while idle.
- A spike scales on its own. The site stays online and fast, even when many arrive at once.
- You start small with a visibility site and later build a customer portal or a whole SaaS on the same architecture, without changing provider.
- An AWS Health Check often pays for itself in the first month through lower cloud costs.
Why me
- You work directly with me, not an account manager who hands the work to a junior.
- 30 years of software engineering and SCMC.ch as proof: the same serverless architecture, in production since November 2025.
- One architecture, one contact, one contract that grows with the scope. In the end you own everything, no lock-in.
- I’m based in Bern, your data sits in AWS Zurich. Fluent German and English, with an understanding of the Swiss business context.
What it costs
A serverless visibility site starts from CHF 2’500 setup, and in operation you essentially pay for actual usage. If it grows into a portal or a SaaS, the scope grows with it, on the same base.
Paying a flat rate even when nobody comes?
In a 30-minute call we work through your model: what you pay for idle today, and what a serverless architecture does differently under a rush.