The S3 + Cognito alternative, fully managed
Everything S3 + Cognito gives you,
without the cert renewals.
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, 15-second publishes, nothing to maintain.
The demo shows an agent publishing a doc to display.dev – from a chat or a terminal – then the team opening its URL, commenting, the agent publishing v2 at the same URL, and the doc being shared with someone outside the company.
Cursor, Codex, Claude Code – any agent that writes a file. Switch agents anytime – your URLs, versions and comments stay put.
Indigo Engineering
display.dev vs. S3 + CloudFront + Cognito + Lambda@Edge
| 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 real cost of DIY
The AWS bill looks tiny: S3 storage, CloudFront bandwidth and Cognito come to $5–20/month. The engineering bill is the one that matters – 16–32 hours of a senior engineer to wire S3, CloudFront, Cognito and Lambda@Edge together correctly, or $2,400–$4,800 before a single page is served.
Managed means none of those lines has an owner on your team.
- ✗Certificate renewalsYours to remember, every year.
- ✗Cognito changes under youGoogle and Microsoft revise their OAuth flows and the integration follows.
- ✗Lambda@Edge version updatesRuntime deprecations arrive on AWS's schedule, not yours.
- ✗Compliance evidence by handIAM policies documented and evidenced by whoever built the stack.
- ✗A single ownerWhen that engineer leaves, it becomes an orphaned auth system nobody wants to touch.
What you get instead
When to use which
- Build it on AWS
- You have cloud-provider requirements a SaaS can't meet – GovCloud, specific regions – or you need network-level access control and device posture checks, or your compliance framework requires an on-premise deployment.
- Use display.dev
- You don't want to maintain infrastructure. You need Google and Microsoft SSO without complex federation. You want a CLI and an MCP tool, and compliance to be "add to the vendor register" rather than a documentation project.
Pricing
Try it. No credit card.
- Included: 10 gated artifacts
- Included: Unlimited public artifacts*
- Included: 50MB storage
- Not included: Version history
- Not included: Google + Microsoft SSO
- Not included: Audit logs
display.dev branded
Individuals. Unlimited gated sharing.
- Included: Unlimited gated artifacts
- Included: Unlimited public artifacts
- Included: 1GB storage
- Included: 10 versions
- Not included: Google + Microsoft SSO
- Not included: Audit logs
For teams that need company auth.
- Included: Unlimited gated artifacts
- Included: Unlimited public artifacts
- Included: 25GB storage
- Included: 50 versions
- Included: Google + Microsoft SSO
- Included: 90 days audit logs
For compliance-driven organizations.
From €499/mo
- Included: Unlimited gated artifacts
- Included: Unlimited public artifacts
- Included: Custom storage
- Included: Unlimited versions
- Included: Google + Microsoft SSO
- Included: 365 days audit logs
Try display.dev free
- €49/month – vs. $2,400–$4,800 to build DIY, plus ongoing maintenance
- Google + Microsoft SSO out of the box – no federation to configure
- First artifact in 15 seconds · No credit card
Features
Viewers click a link and sign in with their Google or Microsoft account, or a one-time password. No app to install. No account to create. No IT ticket.
Inline comments on every artifact. Your agent reads them via MCP, fetches the current version, republishes with short_id and base_version, and resolves the thread. The artifact stays the current version at the same URL, not a one-shot screenshot.
dsp publish ./file.html from your terminal, or one sentence in Claude Desktop. No git repo, no deploy pipeline, no project to configure.
Every artifact gets a URL that keeps working. Share in Slack, link in Notion, paste in email. It still works six months later.
No per-seat pricing at any tier. Share with your PM, exec, legal team, or designer for the same flat price.
Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code all work, along with any agent that creates HTML or Markdown output.
Common questions.
Is there a way to get DIY costs below €49/month?
Infrastructure alone: yes, $5–20/month. Total cost including initial build and ongoing maintenance: no.
Can I migrate from DIY to display.dev?
Yes. Run dsp publish on the same HTML files you're currently serving from S3. Update the links. Decommission the stack.
Does display.dev use AWS/S3 under the hood?
display.dev runs on managed infrastructure. You don't need to know or configure any of it.
Do viewers need an account with us?
No. They open the link and sign in with the Google or Microsoft account they already use, or with a code sent to their email. Viewers are unlimited on every plan, including Free.
Publish your first artifact in 15 seconds.
Free tier. No credit card. One-time password auth on free, Google + Microsoft SSO on Pro (€49/month flat).