We cut serverless spend 90% by doing less

Serverless is cheap until it isn't. For a global consumer app, millions of tiny invocations added up to a bill that made no sense for the work being done. We profiled the hot paths and found most invocations were doing trivially cacheable work. Migrating those paths to a leaner backend with Varnish in front cut serverless spend by 90% — and improved app load time 8% while we were at it. The takeaway isn't "serverless bad." It's that architecture is a pricing decision. Know what each request costs, and design like you're the one paying the bill. Because someone is.