State of the art of Serverless - Q1 2026 - Cost estimation #2

Go back to list

A second scenario examines a more latency-sensitive and lightweight workload: a custom One-Time Password service. In modern authentication flows, OTP generation and validation sit on the critical path of the user journey, triggered at login, account recovery, or transaction confirmation. Each request is short-lived, stateless by nature, and demands near-instant execution, making it one of the cleaner fits for a serverless execution model.

This profile represents a category of microservices, small, sharp, and event-driven, where serverless pricing can be particularly competitive against always-on alternatives.

Below, the baseline used for estimate costs for running such workloads

Provider
AWS
Azure
Google
Oracle
T Cloud
Scaleway
Service Lambda x86 Lambda arm Container Apps * Cloud Run Functions Functions FunctionGraph✦ Serverless✦
Region eu-central-1 West Europe europe-west3 FRA eu-de fr-par
Size 128MB 0.25CPU 0.5GB 0.5CPU 128MB 128MB 128MB 0.1CPU 128MB
Calculation
Requests $0.20 x 2 $0.56 x 2 $0.40 x 2 $0.2 x 2 $0.19 x 2 /
CPU / 0.000034 x 0.25 x 3 x 2000000 ✧ 0.0000336 x 0.1 x 3 x 2000000 / / 0.000011422 x 0.1 x 3 x 2000000
Memory 0.0000167 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000 0.0000133 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000 0.000004 x 0.25 x 3 x 2000000 0.0000035 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000 0.00001417 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000 0.000016667 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000 0.0000011422 x 0.128 x 3 x 2000000
Estimation
Requests $0.40 $1.12 $0.80 $0.40 $0.38 /
CPU / $51.00 $20.16 / / $6.85
Memory $12.83 $10.21 $6.00 $2.69 $10.88 $12.80 $0.88
Total $13.23 $10.61 $58.12 $23.65 $11.28 $13.18 $7.73
  • *: Each container app manage 1 request maximum
  • ✧: Instances have a ratio of 1CPU:2GB, we selected 0.5CPU/1GB
  • ✦: From Euro during March 2026

Source