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Part 6 of 7 · Search rank reporter series ~5 min read

What the search rank reporter costs

This reads an API once a week and does arithmetic on a few thousand rows, which makes it the cheapest system in the series alongside the domain watcher. Four fetches is one site reported weekly. Here is where each cent goes.

Key takeaways

  • About $1 a month at 3 sites weekly. Roughly $1 at 13 sites weekly.
  • One Bedrock read per weekly fetch is the only line that scales. Everything else is rounding.
  • Nothing is always-on, so a quiet month genuinely costs almost nothing.
  • No model, and the API is free. The bill is the fixed band plus a few emails.
  • 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 search rank reporter at three volumesA stacked bar chart with three bars, one per volume tier: 4 fetches totalling about $1, 3 sites weekly totalling about $1, and 13 sites weekly totalling about $1. Each bar is stacked from bands. The largest and fastest-growing is Bedrock, one read per weekly fetch, 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$0.5$1$1.5$2~$1.244 fetches~$1.263 sites weekly~$1.3213 sites weeklyBedrock — one read per weekly fetchSES — 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 weekly fetch — is the only part that grows; the orange fixed band is the same 86 cents at every volume.

Line by line

LineAt 3 sites weeklyHow it scales
Bedrock read$0.00Linear. One call per weekly fetch, roughly 1,800 in and 200 out tokens.
SES$0.01Linear. About 1.2 messages per weekly fetch.
DynamoDB + S3$0.28Storage 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, deliberately. The API is free within generous quotas and the whole variable cost is a handful of emails.

The three ways this bill surprises you

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

  • Fetching daily instead of weekly. The data lags by days and is noisy at daily granularity, so daily fetching multiplies the storage and produces a worse signal.
  • Storing grouped totals only. Not a cost risk but the expensive mistake: a theme rule change then cannot be applied to history, and every rule refinement starts a new series from zero.
  • Log retention left at never. A weekly job that produces almost nothing will still be entirely a CloudWatch bill within a year.

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. 4 fetches, about $1. 3 sites weekly, about $1. 13 sites weekly, about $1. 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~$14 fetches~$13 sites weekly~$113 sites weekly~$1One 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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