Why we build on the edge (and what it costs us)
Our own products run with zero servers on Cloudflare. Here is what that decision bought us, what it took away, and when we still reach for AWS.
· 1 min read
Every product BILPP operates — the eSIM brands, the reseller portals, this site — runs on Cloudflare Workers with no server anywhere. That was not a philosophy at first. It was a constraint: a one-person engineering team cannot babysit machines.
What it bought us
Latency for free. Static pages served from the edge open in well under a second in Berlin, Istanbul and Tokyo alike. For a marketing site in 41 languages, that is the whole SEO story.
A bill that follows usage. Idle products cost close to nothing. A site that suddenly gets traffic scales without a call to anyone.
One deploy path. astro build && wrangler deploy. The same pipeline ships sixteen sites and a portal; new destination brands go live in days because there is no infrastructure to provision.
What it took away
Long-running jobs, big relational queries and anything that wants a persistent connection are awkward at the edge. D1 is excellent for the shapes we designed around it; it is not a drop-in Postgres. When a client’s workload is a classic ERP-style system with heavy reporting, we build it on AWS with a managed database and say so in the proposal.
The rule we use
If the product can be described as “pages, forms, small APIs and queues”, it goes on the edge. If it is “one big database and many joins”, it does not.
That rule has held for three years. It keeps our own costs low and our client recommendations honest — because we are not selling the platform, we are living on it.