This is the big difference between App Engine. It scales to zero automatically. PROD enterprise apps are generally used between 8am and 6pm 5 days a week. In most cases this falls under the free threshold because you don’t pay for the hours you don’t use. For DEV and UAT it’s extremely rare to ever pay for an environment. In fact the last time we paid for DEV/UAT was when we ran a load test about a year ago.
It’s only the big user bases with high load per user that end up costing something. These are typically $10-$50 per month not hundreds or thousands.
When we last used Elastic Beanstalk this was not the case as it’s orchestrating underlying AWS services like ECS and those only scale to 1. Sure you can work around this but it creates hassle and slows the team down. This might have changed, so don’t quote me on that :)
