Why Your Infrastructure Gets More Expensive as You Scale
An interactive cost-economics dashboard showing why doubling users can quadruple the cloud bill. As the traffic slider climbs 1x → 10x, compute rises linearly while the coupled non-compute layers — cross-AZ egress, verbose telemetry, and idle storage — scale super-linearly (~traffic^2.1), pushing non-compute past 50% of the bill and cost-per-transaction from ~$0.02 to ~$0.12. The Infrastructure Iceberg and Metered Faucet metaphors reveal the hidden mass below the compute 'sticker price', then zone-aware routing + telemetry sampling + lifecycle cleanup flatten unit economics back to baseline while traffic stays at 10x. Benchmarks cited: Intel/Gartner compute = 45–50% of the bill, Flexera 2024 29–35% of cloud spend wasted.
LIVE SIMULATION
HOW THIS RUNS
This is a live, interactive recreation embedded directly on the page — not a static diagram. Step through the scenes above to watch traffic reroute across the tiers in real time. The embedded simulation is recorded on screen, and that capture becomes the content.