Cost
shipzy is free and open source. You pay AWS directly for what you use, and nothing on top. This page shows the arithmetic and is honest about where it is not the cheapest choice.
These are estimates. They use AWS list prices as we understand them at the time of writing, for the US East region. Prices and free allowances change, so check the AWS pricing pages before you rely on a number.
What you pay for
| Service | Used for | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| CloudFront | Serving your sites | First 1 TB and 10M requests a month are free; after that about $0.085 per GB and $1 per million requests |
| Router (CloudFront Function and routing table) | Choosing which deploy to serve | About $0.13 per million requests ($0.10 for the function, $0.03 for the routing table), after a free allowance for the function |
| S3 | Storing every deploy | About $0.023 per GB a month. Retention keeps it small |
| Secrets Manager | GitHub token and webhook secret | $0.40 per secret a month, so about $0.80 fixed |
| CodeBuild | Remote and GitHub builds | 100 build minutes a month free, then about $0.005 a minute |
| Route 53 | DNS, only if you use it | $0.50 per hosted zone a month |
| Certificates, Lambda, parameters, logs | Domains, publishing, variables | Free or fractions of a cent at this scale |
The only charges that exist when nothing is happening are the two secrets and, if you use it, the DNS zone: about $1 to $1.50 a month.
Examples
| Situation | The arithmetic | About |
|---|---|---|
| A few small sites, light traffic | Fixed $0.80 to $1.30. Traffic and builds stay inside the free allowances. | $1 to $2 |
| A team of five, previews on every pull request | Fixed about $1.30, plus roughly 750 build minutes (650 over the free 100, about $3). | $2 to $5 |
| A busy site with 10 TB of traffic a month | 9 TB over the free 1 TB at about $0.085 per GB, plus requests. | $700 to $800 |
Compared with the alternatives
| Situation | Per-seat hosted platforms | Free static hosts | shipzy on AWS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal or hobby site | Free tiers, often non-commercial only | Free | About $1 to $2, so you will not save money here |
| Commercial site, small team | Typically a paid plan per person | Free | The same $1 to $5 however many people deploy |
| Very high traffic | Usually overage charges on bandwidth | Free or cheap | AWS bandwidth pricing, usually cheaper than platform overage |
Where shipzy tends to save money: teams (no per-seat charge), high traffic (AWS bandwidth rates), companies with AWS credits or committed spend, and agencies hosting many client sites.
When shipzy is not the right choice
- You want it free. Free static hosts exist, and shipzy does not beat free.
- You do not want an AWS account. shipzy needs one, and setting it up takes longer than connecting a repository to a hosted platform.
- You need server rendering today. shipzy serves static sites for now.
Keeping the bill predictable
- Ask for a spending alert:
shipzy init --budget 25 --budget-email you@example.comcreates an AWS Budget that emails you at 80% and 100% of the amount, and when AWS forecasts you will pass it. AWS has no hard spending cap, so this is a warning, not a stop. It watches the whole account. - Run
shipzy costat any time for this month so far and a projection for the whole month. - Retention is on by default: the newest ten deploys of each project are kept, plus anything live, so storage stays bounded.
- Small sites sit comfortably inside the CloudFront free allowance. A sudden increase in traffic is the thing to watch.
shipzy cost is an estimate built from CloudWatch usage and list prices; your AWS Billing page is the exact figure. See the CLI reference and limits and roadmap.