The "what if it goes viral" calculator

One celebrity blast.
Millions of accounts. What's the bill?

Picture a global icon posting once, and millions of people opening a Bitword account, leaving one positive review, and looking around for five minutes. Move the sliders. The surprising part is how small the cloud bill is — and how easily startup credits absorb it.

Model the spike.

The wave

People who open an account (millions) 10

Server requests per person (signup, review, browsing) 60

Data each person downloads in the session (MB) 8

Database writes per person (account + review + …) 4

Cloud pricing (editable)

Data transfer out — $ per GB $0.085

Compute — $ per million requests $2.0

Database — $ per million writes $1.25

Credit pool available (startup credits) $100K

Data transfer (egress)— GB out
$0
Compute— requests
$0
Database writes— writes
$0
Overhead buffer+25% for reads, logging, autoscale slack
$0

Estimated one-time cost of the whole spike

Covered by credits.

0total requests

0data transferred

$0cost per 1,000 users

Rough order-of-magnitude estimate, not a quote. Real costs depend heavily on caching (a CDN cuts egress sharply), architecture efficiency, and how much media each page loads. The point isn't the exact number — it's that a one-time multi-million-user surge lands in the low thousands to low tens of thousands of dollars, which startup credits absorb. The real operational risk is the concurrency spike, which you handle with autoscaling + a CDN, not a bigger budget.

One celebrity blast.Millions of accounts. What's the bill?

Model the spike.

One celebrity blast.
Millions of accounts. What's the bill?