Evidence-Based Cost Analysis
One of the primary goals of Paperless-NGX On-Demand is bringing the cloud hosting cost down to the level of a cup of coffee per month, eliminating the financial barrier for home and personal users.
1. Itemized Monthly Cost Breakdown (On-Demand)
Section titled “1. Itemized Monthly Cost Breakdown (On-Demand)”The table below reflects AWS pricing in us-east-1 (US East, N. Virginia) for an active personal user storing 10 GB of documents (~5,000 pages of scanned receipts and PDFs) and accessing the system for 1 hour per day:
| Service Component | Configuration & Usage | Monthly Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 Compute | t4g.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM)30 active hours/mo @ $0.0336/hr |
$1.01 | $0.00/hour when stopped during idle periods. |
| EBS Storage | 10 GB gp3 root volume @ $0.080/GB-mo | $0.80 | Stores OS, SQLite DB, and Whoosh index. |
| S3 Storage | 10 GB Standard @ $0.023/GB-mo | $0.23 | Stores document binaries, thumbnails, and backups. |
| CloudFront CDN | Edge distribution & KeyValueStore | $0.00 | Covered under Always-Free Tier (1 TB transfer & 10M requests/mo). |
| AWS Lambda | Wakeup function (< 1,000 invocations/mo) | $0.00 | Covered under Always-Free Tier (1,000,000 requests/mo). |
| VPC Gateway Endpoint | S3 Gateway Endpoint | $0.00 | Free of charge; zero data transfer fees to S3. |
| ACM TLS Certificate | Public wildcard or subdomain certificate | $0.00 | Free SSL/TLS certificates provided by AWS. |
| Total Cloud Bill | Typical Active Usage (1 hr/day) | $2.04 / month |
Sensitivity Analysis: What If You Use It More?
Section titled “Sensitivity Analysis: What If You Use It More?”- Light User (30 minutes/day): 15 active hours = $1.53 / month.
- Average User (1 hour/day): 30 active hours = $2.04 / month.
- Heavy User (2 hours/day): 60 active hours = $3.05 / month.
- Travel / Vacation (0 hours/day): 0 active hours = $1.03 / month (Storage only).
2. Comparison: On-Demand vs. Traditional 24/7 Cloud Architectures
Section titled “2. Comparison: On-Demand vs. Traditional 24/7 Cloud Architectures”Standard tutorials for hosting Docker containers or Paperless on AWS typically prescribe 24/7 managed services. Here is what that actually costs:
| Resource | Traditional 24/7 Architecture | On-Demand (This Project) | Monthly Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | 24/7 EC2 t4g.medium (730 hrs) = $24.53 |
Scale-to-Zero EC2 (30 hrs) = $1.01 | $23.52 / mo |
| Database | Amazon RDS PostgreSQL db.t4g.micro = $18.25 |
Local NVMe SQLite + S3 snapshots = $0.00 | $18.25 / mo |
| Networking | AWS NAT Gateway (730 hrs + data) = $32.85 | Public subnet + Free S3 Gateway Endpoint = $0.00 | $32.85 / mo |
| File Storage | Amazon EFS (10 GB general purpose) = $3.00 | S3 Standard + gp3 EBS = $1.03 | $1.97 / mo |
| Total Monthly Cost | $78.63+ / month | $2.04 / month | 97.4% Savings |
3. External Prerequisites Costs (Outside AWS Infrastructure)
Section titled “3. External Prerequisites Costs (Outside AWS Infrastructure)”To maintain complete transparency, the following items are managed outside the AWS deployment stack:
| Item | Provider | Approximate Cost | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Registration | Cloudflare, Namecheap, Route 53, Porkbun | $8.00 – $14.00 | Per Year (~$0.85/month) |
| AWS Account Account Base | Amazon Web Services | $0.00 | Free to open and maintain |
| DNS Hosting | Cloudflare Free DNS or Route 53 Hosted Zone | $0.00 – $0.50 | Free (Cloudflare) or $0.50/mo (Route 53) |
[!TIP] If you already own a personal domain hosted on Cloudflare or another DNS provider, you can add a
pod.yourdomain.comCNAME pointing to CloudFront with zero additional DNS hosting costs.