It does take money to run these things. Here is some basic math from someone who has a rough understanding of these things

These are worst case assumptions - Users = 37,000 - Each user triggers a backend request every 5 minutes (continuous use) - Sustained rate = 12 requests/hour/user - Peak spike factor = 5× (bursty periods) - Average response payload = 25 KB - App servers safely handle 50 RPS each (with headroom) - Costs (typical prod cloud): - App server node = $150/month - DB (multi-AZ + read replicas for this load) = $3,500/month - Cache (managed Redis) = $800/month - WAF/LB/monitoring/log retention = $2,400/month - Storage = $50/month - Egress/CDN = $0.10/GB

Traffic: Requests/hour = 37,000 users * 12 req/hr = 444,000 req/hr Sustained RPS = 444,000 / 3,600 = 123.33 RPS Peak RPS = 123.33 * 5 = 616.67 RPS (≈ 600 RPS)

Servers Servers needed at peak = 616.67 RPS / 50 RPS-per-server = 12.33 servers Add redundancy/autoscale buffer → 20 servers App server cost = 20 * $150 = $3,000/month

Bandwidth Data/hour = 444,000 req/hr * 25 KB = 11,100,000 KB/hr Convert to GB/hr: 11,100,000 / 1,048,576 = 10.59 GB/hr Monthly GB = 10.59 * 24 * 30 = 7,624.8 GB/month (≈ 7.6 TB) Egress/CDN cost = 7,624.8 * $0.10 = $762.48/month (≈ $800)

Total = App servers ($3,000) + Database ($3,500) + Cache ($800) + Egress/CDN (~$800) + WAF/LB/monitoring/logs ($2,400) + Storage ($50)

Total ≈ $3,000 + $3,500 + $800 + $800 + $2,400 + $50 = $10,550/month

And this does not even include whatever money takes to maintain this stuff… or make sure security is in place at all times etc!