I've been hosting a Datasette (https://baseballdb.lawlesst.net, aka baseballdb) of historical baseball data for a few years and the last year or so it has been hosted on Google Cloud Run. I thought I would share my hosting costs for 2020 as a point of reference for others who might be interested in running a Datasette but aren't sure how much it may cost.

The total hosting cost on Google Cloud Run for 2020 for the baseballdb was $51.31, or a monthly average of about $4.28 USD. The monthly bill did vary a fair amount from as high as $13 in May to as low as $2 in March. Since I did no deployments during this time or updates to the site, I assume the variation in costs is related to the amount queries the Datasette was serving. I don't have a good sense of how many total queries per month this instance is serving since I'm not using Google Analytics or similar.

Google does report that it is subtracting $49.28 in credits for the year but I don't expect those credits/promotions to expire anytime soon since my projected costs for 2021 is $59.

This cost information is somewhat incomplete without knowing the number of queries served per month but it is a benchmark. The site is freely available and there's no attempt to limit its usage. In short, it costs about as much as a nice latte to run each month. For me, that's a low enough cost to keep it around for the few times a year I care to use it and for any utility others may be getting from it.

Thanks again to Simon Willison for building and maintaining Datasette and to the Chadwick Bureau for maintaining, and making freely available, the Baseball Databank.