Did a quick cost calc (with the help of gpt5, so might be wrong) when I read their comment about Pages not being suitable for this many files.
They say they're receiving $500/mo in donos and that it's currently just enough to cover their infra costs. Given 300 million 70 KB files, R2 + high cache hit ratio would work out to about $300 in storage-months + request costs, or $600/mo with Cache Reserve and then they'd always hit cache if I understand the project right: meaning the costs shouldn't blow up beyond that, and that request count would essentially just not matter.
Factor in that you also need resources to generate and upload the tiles weekly.
Yea but the cost is not a fixed monthly sum and things can go wrong as we can see from the blog post. An accident could bankrupt the dev.
A dedicated server will always cost the same so you always know how much you pay.
It will cost 40 Euro/month to have 6 cores/12 threads,64gb of ram and 1Tb of ssd.
Dirt cheap compared to any other alternative