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Part 6 of 7 · Referral payout runner series ~5 min read

What the referral payout runner costs

There is no model in this system and the messaging is one statement per active referrer per month plus hold notices. Eight hundred referrals a month is a programme that is genuinely working. Here is where each cent goes.

Key takeaways

  • About $2 a month at 800 referrals. Roughly $6 at 3,000 referrals.
  • One Bedrock read per referral is the only line that scales. Everything else is rounding.
  • Nothing is always-on, so a quiet month genuinely costs almost nothing.
  • Statements, not referrals, drive the messaging line, and there are far fewer referrers than referrals.
  • The duplicate test runs before the read, so resends are free.
  • The three real risks: a retry loop, storage nobody expires, and a bigger model than the job needs.

The bill at three volumes

These are US East prices at the time of writing, at three volumes that bracket most small businesses. Find the bar closest to your own and read across.

Monthly cost of the referral payout runner at three volumesA stacked bar chart with three bars, one per volume tier: 200 referrals totalling about $2, 800 referrals totalling about $2, and 3,000 referrals totalling about $6. Each bar is stacked from bands. The largest and fastest-growing is Bedrock, one read per referral, in teal. Then SES for the messages, in pink. Then S3 and DynamoDB storage in green. Then a fixed orange band for Secrets Manager and AWS Budgets, which is eighty-six cents at every volume. Then a grey band for Lambda, SQS and CloudWatch. A note says the read is the only bar that grows with the business and the orange band never moves.$0$2$4$6$8~$1.55200 referrals~$2.48800 referrals~$5.893,000 referralsBedrock — one read per referralSES — asks, results, receiptsS3 + DynamoDBFixed — Secrets Manager, BudgetsLambda, SQS, CloudWatchThe read is the only bar that grows with the business. The orange fixed band never moves.
Fig 1. The monthly bill at three volumes. The teal band — one model read per referral — is the only part that grows; the orange fixed band is the same 86 cents at every volume.

Line by line

LineAt 800 referralsHow it scales
Bedrock read$0.00Linear. One call per referral, roughly 1,800 in and 200 out tokens.
SES$0.43Linear. About 0.4 messages per referral.
DynamoDB + S3$0.41Storage grows with what you retain, not with throughput.
Lambda + SQS$0.12Linear, and effectively free at this scale.
CloudWatch$0.16Flat, if you set retention. Unbounded if you do not.
Secrets Manager$0.40Flat. One secret, $0.40 a month.
AWS Budgets$0.46Flat. Two actions, so you find out before the bill does.

There is no read line: nothing here calls a model. The messaging band covers monthly statements and hold notices, not one message per referral.

The three ways this bill surprises you

Every one of these has happened to somebody, and all three are cheap to prevent.

  • Storing state instead of events and then rebuilding history. Not a running cost so much as an unbounded one-off when somebody has to reconstruct six months of decisions.
  • Running the qualifier continuously. Referrals become payable on a date. A daily sweep is sufficient and a per-minute one is not more correct.
  • Per-referral payment transfers. The transfer fee usually exceeds the arithmetic cost of the entire system. Batch into one transfer per person per run.

What it costs when nothing happens

This matters more than the headline number for a seasonal business. In a month with nothing to process the bill is the fixed band: Secrets Manager at forty cents, AWS Budgets at forty-six, and a few cents of storage. Call it a dollar. There is no instance to stop and nothing to remember to turn off.

The monthly bill at four volumes plus one failure modeA horizontal row of five boxes. Quiet month, about one dollar. 200 referrals, about $2. 800 referrals, about $2. 3,000 referrals, about $6. And one bad retry loop, about two hundred dollars. A note says four of these are the design working and the fifth is a missing dead-letter queue.THE BILL, AT A GLANCEQuiet month~$1200 referrals~$2800 referrals~$23,000 referrals~$6One bad loop~$200Four of these are the design working. The fifth is a missing dead-letter queue.
Fig 2. The bill at a glance, including the one that is not a volume at all. A retry loop with no dead-letter queue costs more than every legitimate use of the system put together.
  • Management
  • Analytics
  • Front-end & mobile

Set these on day one

  • A dead-letter queue on every SQS queue, with a maximum receive count of three.
  • Thirty-day retention on every CloudWatch log group. There is no default that is safe.
  • An S3 lifecycle rule on the object prefix, tiering at 90 days and expiring at your actual record-keeping horizon.
  • Two AWS Budgets actions — one that emails at half your expected spend, one at double it. The second is how you find out about a loop in an hour instead of a month.
  • Provisioned concurrency: none. Nothing here is latency-sensitive enough to justify paying for a warm function.

Next: the same system drawn for engineers — service names, resource identifiers, IAM scopes, table schemas and the model id.

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