7 Days, $0.02 in AWS Costs, and 3 Lessons I Didn't Expect — A Post-Launch Retrospective

A week ago I launched dontdothat.click — a privacy-first AI habit tracker that runs entirely in the browser. I wrote about the build process in my last post . The stack is dead simple: S3 + CloudFront + Route 53. Total infrastructure budget: $3. Now I have a week of real data. Some of it confirmed what I expected. Some of it didn't. The Numbers Let's start with what everyone wants to know: Route 53 hosted zone: $0.50 (flat monthly) S3 storage: $0.00 (35KB of files, lol) S3 requests: $0.01 CloudFront transfer: $0.01 CloudFront requests: $0.00 ACM certificate: $0.00 ──────────────────────────────── Total week 1: $0.52 Annualized: ~$27/year (mostly the hosted zone) The hosted zone ($0.50/month = $6/year) costs more than the domain itself ($3/year). That's... not something the tutorials mention. If I were doing this again with an even tighter budget, I'd consider whether I really need Route 53 for DNS or if the registrar's free DNS would work. Spoiler: for a static site, it absolutely woul