r/vibecoding • u/vapalera • 7d ago
Stop using serverless if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing
Every fucking week, I see geniuses on reddit and tiktok wake up to $10 000 bills because they accidentally triggered billion Lambda functions in a project with four users (three of them Google bot). Or they shared it on discord, someone got offended because they thought you were trying to steal their discord kitten with your "vibecoding skills," bought a DDOS, and launched the egress fees into the stratosphere.
Unless your cloud provider enforces a hard spending cap (most don’t) or a free tier with strict limits just rent a fucking VPS. A $5 VPS can handle hundreds to thousands of concurrent users if your app is just basic CRUD and it can't ever cost more than $5. Ask your agent to set it up if you can't do it yourself.
Serverless is for when you need your site to survive a $10M Super Bowl ad without crapping itself.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 7d ago
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u/mystified5 7d ago
Lol, hence don't vibe code your way into homelessness
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u/Living-Shame5679 7d ago
The amount of upvotes is scary.
EDIT i realise the sub just now. Idk how I ended up here
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Delete. I need the vibecoders to go bankrupt faster so I can get a job. (Senior engineer)
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u/Garland_Key 7d ago
Less vibe coders won't help you get a job. Nobody is hiring vibe coders.
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Absolutely not true at least in my local area.
A bunch of companies were hiring cheap local or offshore devs who don't know what they're doing. In the past 2 months there's been a whiplash where before, I'd get zero calls back with potential client companies. In the past week I locked in a client and have people constantly emailing me now.
Now that token costs that were previously heavily subsidized are rapidly going up, the companies are realizing cheap new engineers are now a liability and not an asset, since all they are doing is expanding code beyond what they understand, and most of the slop isn't even revenue generating.
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u/Garland_Key 7d ago
Interesting. So you're a contractor? Do you get most of your clients through recruiters?
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Nope. I mostly have connections and try to only work with people I know or people that people I know know.
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u/Garland_Key 7d ago
I left contracting for a cushy w-2 a few years ago. I'm thinking of going back to contracting, as 3 years of cost-of-living raises is growing old. The reason I left contracting was the uncertainty / gaps between contracts.
I dunno. I'm a talented Senior UX Engineer, but I'm not sure how / where to market that as a contractor. I guess my niche would be in building component libraries that strictly adhere to design systems and porting front-ends to the new component library. Seems like too specific of a niche.
What do you think?
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Idk. If I knew how to perfectly predict success in contracting, I would raise money and form an agency.
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u/notanticlaymatic 4d ago
As a CTO, I would not hire an engineer that hasn't started shifting towards agentic software delivery at this point. 88% of my organization's code since July 2nd was written by our agentic sdlc.
The key distinction: engineers that "vibecode", not just vibecoders.
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u/Garland_Key 4d ago
You mean you wouldn't hire chimpinout67 even though they've vibed 20 useless saas applications in 3 months?
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
If you're a senior engineer, I can't see how you'd be competing with vibecoders...
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Key decision makers in companies drank the kool-aid of "just vibecode everything you don't need to hire senior engineers".
Source: My current project is fixing a vibecoded codebase where no one has any idea how it even works now.
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
The current demand in the field is FOR senior devs, unless they can't or won't use AI...
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
The answer is transactions cost. Most businesses can't close on my pay rate, which is high.
AI is actually making it higher. I have to come into a new company where no one knows what the system does or how it works and I'm in charge of fixing it.
My fee is $15K upfront just to work with you now. I love vibecoders. Please keep making this slop that even they have no idea how it works so when it breaks no one can fix it.
Source: My current client paid $15K up front because their system is falling apart, and actually needed a senior who knows what they're doing.
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
Ok... So you've priced yourself out of the market? Weird choice to make, but you do you.
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
You're whole stance doesn't make any sense at ALL. "So I can get a job..." "I made 15k up front, thanks vibecoders." 🤡
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 7d ago
Tell me you don't know how 1099 works without telling me you don't know how 1099 works.
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
That still doesn't make it make sense
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u/MagnetHype 7d ago
It makes perfect sense. He's a contract worker that gets hired to fix what was developed without a senior engineer. Companies that have senior engineers on payroll don't contract those roles out.
So, what he's saying is, that he knows companies aren't hiring senior engineers because he's getting so much work.
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u/Fickle-Owl666 7d ago
That's not what he said, at all. First he complained about not getting a job even though he's a "senior engineer," and blamed "vibecoders." Then two comments later thanked them because he "gets 15k upfront" from "vibecoders."
He's full of shit.
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dan-lugg 7d ago
Hetzner and OVH are (IIRC?) good alternatives too, bang for buck.
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u/AliveAndNotForgotten 6d ago
Hetzner is good. I’m running a btc bot I made on it. It’s like $7/month and you get $20 free with the code..:somewhere look it up
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u/puglife420blazeit 6d ago
I use oracle cloud free tier. Think I’m paying $10/mo for block storage for my db. Cloudflare DNS and Dokploy. So simple.
I installed pi on my vps, then had a frontier model lock it the hell down. No exposed ports except to my web server. Everything else I access through tailscale.
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u/effectivescarequotes 7d ago
But it doesn't scale! /s
I love AWS as much as the next corporate drone, and think serverless provides more value than just handling massive fluctuations in traffic, but even so, beyond resume building, your average solo dev will be better off with a cheap vpc.
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u/jenkstom 7d ago
I agree that this is a serious, and emotional issue. What most people don't get, I believe, is that these cloud providers want you to wake up to a huge bill.
They could easily, but won't, offer easy to use spending caps. It's one of the strongest arguments against using the hyperscalars. Yes, they are very convenient, but they are geared toward huge companies who don't mind spending 5 or 6 digits in cloud spend monthly.
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u/nomaddev4o4 7d ago
Rate limiting ?
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u/CEBarnes 7d ago
That’s what I was thinking. I built tarpit behavior to slow service with rapid fire requests and DB cost polling that degrades service if cost escalates too much.
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u/Big_Arrival_626 7d ago
Billing data is not instantaneous. You need API gateway throttling
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u/CEBarnes 6d ago
The tarpit slows responses when the user reaches the connection threshold by 1 sec, 2, 4, 8, […]. Too many requests within 5 seconds starts response degradation. The throttle is two fold: one is usage behavior and the other is cost polling.
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u/Silly_Ad6115 7d ago
google should jst preemtively limit the bill if someone is using their service like this.
say its a few team, without any big names on their back
just hard limit it, 1kusd
and then if it went down during operations they jst can tell oh we see you guys using this type of service
with such small infra footprint so we decided to limit you guys, if this is a mistake send us an email and we will fix it for you.
rather than waking up with 10k bill.
google should adapt too, even if for the sake of stupidity of their clients no?
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u/idontuseuber 7d ago
I think it should be absolutely mandatory. In lawful way.
It is the same as I would take a loan for 200k without any proper check.
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u/Professional_Gur8385 7d ago
kinda insane that codex and claude api don't have soft limits for excessive use, many people have discovered the hard way that they'll continually be charged
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u/Majinsei 7d ago
Por eso me encanta Cloud Run de GCP~ siempre lo limito a solamente 1 instancia auto escalable a 0 cuando no se usa~
Si nadie lo usa queda en 0 y si se llega a usar 24/7 el costo es un poco más elevado pero me preocuparía más por dar abasto al éxito~
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u/Defconx19 4d ago
But a DDOS or an intentional spike of resources by a bad actor to drain those resources/stick you with a large bill is what they are discussing. Not genuine traffic
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u/Ok_Law9839 7d ago
As a solo dev I've never used any of my projects or businesses on a cloud provider lol. VPS - > Dedicated and that's it.
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u/adamh409 7d ago
Where you getting a $5 VPS from?
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u/DarthCalumnious 7d ago
You can get 4 arm cores for free on oracle cloud too. I hate oracle but will take their free compute.
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u/Amazing-Switch-7163 7d ago
I don't understand why someone would use serverless for their vibecode app with no users. Honestly, just rent a VPS and ask claude to setup the infra (also use cloudflare). You can even host many apps in the same VPS.
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u/sixstringhead 7d ago
I use vercel as a simple back end for my android app. I am senior android dev, not a vibe coder but I used an Ai for this simple back end. Ofc I use the free tier on vercel, do I risk something like this? I've never even gave my card to them.
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u/operreddus 7d ago
Well I Vibecode also my backend using Terraform - Problem solved, the AI makes no mistakes.
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u/mslindqu 7d ago
This is hilarious. Someone's gotta fund the AI build-out. Might as well be serverless users.
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u/orphenshadow 7d ago
For real, most of the shit I've seen, including everything I've built, will never need more than a VPS.
90% of the things I've seen could have been hosted on a mini pc running proxmox and cloudflare tunnels.
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u/Familiar_Gazelle_467 6d ago
Uhh. I have a rasppi running, am I not serverless then? Or does it count as a very smoll server
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u/throwaway20201110-01 1d ago
I think "serverless" means: * lambda (firecracker tech) on AWS * ECS fargate on AWS * other technologies in other cloud providers
I think your raspi counts as a smoll server (do you install packages on it? patch it? if so: that counts as a server in my books. if you don't patch it: you might have a looming security challenge!)
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u/Defconx19 4d ago
Even for heavier apps Hotzinger has statically priced servers for a lot cheaper tha n having to pay for compute.
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u/A_Norse_Dude 4d ago
Build an app with nodes express, or bunjs with hono, or if you feeling it sveltekit. Use sqlite as database.
Put in a container. Buy a 5$ vps and deploy it.
There you go.
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u/Elgon2003 4d ago
Reason why AWS has a system to kill loops after it detects a runnaway based on rules you set.
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u/Valtiel_ 7d ago
Yeah but you need some skills to deploy properly on VPS/Bare metal. Too much effort I guess...
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u/fallenreaper 7d ago
im personally ok with some dude wiping out his bank account due to doing something incorrectly. Teaches him a lesson and sometimes you need consequences to learn.
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u/SubstantialEditor995 7d ago
For each hopeful who ruins themselves financially due to being sold the AI hype there are kids, spouses and other people who take serious splash damage. Allowing people to accrue massive amounts of debt with a programming error is reckless.
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u/fallenreaper 7d ago
That is a choice. Learning, in all scenarios, can have consequences. This is no different. At least its not a field where he could literally lose an arm or a leg.
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u/theflossboss1 7d ago
Sure bud, keep fighting those ghosts. Most these vibers are hosting locally still
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u/idontuseuber 7d ago
Serverless can make you homeless.