DIY authenticated static hosting costs $5–20/month in infrastructure — plus 1–2 days of engineering time to build and ongoing maintenance to run. display.dev is the managed version: $49/month flat, 15-minute setup, nothing to maintain.
| display.dev | DIY AWS Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly infrastructure cost | $49 | $5–20 |
| Setup time | 15 minutes | 1–2 days |
| Year 1 total cost (at $150/hr eng) | $588 | $3,480–$5,940 |
| Google + Microsoft SSO | ✅ | Complex federation |
| Publish CLI | ✅ | ❌ (custom scripts) |
| MCP integration | ✅ | ❌ |
| Maintenance required | ❌ | ✅ (ongoing) |
| No infrastructure to own | ✅ | ❌ |
The AWS stack costs look attractive: S3 storage, CloudFront bandwidth, and Cognito are cheap. $5–20/month in infrastructure.
The engineering cost is not cheap. Setting up S3 + CloudFront + Cognito + Lambda@Edge correctly takes 16–32 hours for a senior engineer. At $150/hour in fully-loaded cost, that's $2,400–$4,800 before you've served a single page.
Then: certificate renewals, Cognito API updates when Google or Microsoft changes their OAuth flows, Lambda@Edge version updates, IAM policy documentation for compliance. This infrastructure belongs to whoever built it. When they leave, it becomes an orphaned auth system no one wants to touch.
You have specific cloud provider requirements (AWS GovCloud, specific regions). You need network-level access control or device posture checks a SaaS can't provide. Your compliance framework requires on-premise deployment.
You don't want to maintain infrastructure. You need Google AND Microsoft SSO without complex federation. You want a CLI and MCP. You want compliance documentation to be "add to vendor register," not "document and evidence everything yourself."
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Infrastructure alone: yes, $5–20/month. Total cost including initial build and ongoing maintenance: no.
Yes. Run dsp publish on the same HTML files you're currently serving from S3. Update the links. Decommission the stack.
display.dev runs on managed infrastructure. You don't need to know or configure any of it.
Free tier. No credit card. One-time password auth on free, Google + Microsoft SSO on Teams ($49/month flat).