Let me put you in our context, we work with Gatsby as a framework and we rely on the following platforms:
- Netlify: to implement the site.
- Sanity: to manage the content that the client manipulates, it is a headless CMS.
- Github: for version control.
Well, all these platforms have an initial cost of 0€ so it's a wonder, you can be there all the time the development lasts without incurring infrastructure costs, and once the project is launched 0€ so it's a wonder, you can be there all the time the development lasts without incurring infrastructure costs, and once the project is launched as long as you consume the minimum it will still be free.
Here's the free coverage we have:
Netlify Pricing
- **Bandwidth: ** 100 GB/month (then 20$ per 100)
- **Compilation minutes: ** 300 min/month (then $7 for 500 more)
- Serverless features (requests) : 125k per site/month (25€ if you overdo it)
- Serverless functions (runtime) : 100 hours
- **Forms: ** 100 per site ($19 if you overdo it)
- prices extracted as of 10-12-2021 from their website.
It has many more functions and extras, but the ones that interest you are easily these.
If Netlify makes you scratch your pocket, it means that things are working well on your project**, and if not, some business strategy is wrong.
As you can see, they are numbers that allow a lot of play and that if you overdo it, it's not a drama either, the only one that falls a little short is the form, which is the action of sending an email to a user, and it's also a little shocking that they are so few compared to the rest.
Let me explain my conclusion about the forms.
Forms on Netlify
This is because the level of difficulty of implementing is minimal, it's as simple as inserting the property “data-netlify” in “true” into the html form and it would work, you would send it and it would arrive at our Netlify and there atclick* hit you can configure what to do with it:
- Send it to an email address
- Activate a webhook
- That it reaches Slack directly.
But of course, if you are spending every month you can think that it is a piece of money, that it is 16.85€ at the monthly exchange rate and that it is more than 200€ per year and that for that price you blablabla will serve you all your life.
Keep Calm
The fun of these things is that we are free to change infrastructure, you can continue to use Netlify perfectly and send emails through Amazon AWS for example, because if you don't have the application with them the price is: $0.10 for every 1000 emails (yes, a thousand). And if you send attachments, $0.12 per GB. If you have the application hosted on Amazon EC2, the first 62000 (yes, sixty-two thousand) are free, then at 0.10 per 1000.
You may think that you throw AWS first and that's it, but beware, that this has to be implemented and for those things it goes through the box too, but of course it's worth studying.
We start from the basis of starting with the simple and economical, obviously if we see that a project doesn't even have to start with 100 forms then we are going... nowhere.
CONCLUSION
**We stayed on Netlify. **
But we don't use their implementation of “Forms”, thanks to the** “Serverless functions” ** we can do a little what we want, among other things, send forms, after all, we have at our disposal a Node server in case we need it, with, as I said above, 125000 requests and 100 hours of processing, sending an email is 1 second or less, so per time you could send... 360000, but this exceeds the requests so we left it at 125000 for free (I confirm, one hundred and twenty-five thousand emails).
So, once free borders are crossed and with the scenario that we no longer need to consume functions, the price of sending an email remains at:
- Netlify (forms) : 0.19€
- **Netlify (serverless functions) **: $0.0002
- **AWS IS: * 0.001$
What I like most about implementing technologies like this is that you go from the bottom up and **by distributing the use cases/problems/features you can focus on just one and look for the solution to that problem without compromising the rest of the project. **
**If they charge you a lot for your phone, you don't have to change the boiler. **
In the end I focused on a specific point, for the next one I'll mess with the rest of the points, otherwise this will be too long.
As you can see, the implementation details can make something cost a lot, little or almost nothing, but if you don't want to worry about these details, we already care about you.
