Figma AWS Costs Explained: Beyond the Hype and Panic

Posted on July 16, 2025 by steefjan1970

Figma’s recent IPO filing revealed that its Figma AWS costs amount to roughly $300,000 per day, approximately $109 million annually, or 12% of its reported revenue of $821 million. The company is also committed to a minimum spend of $545 million with AWS over the next five years. Cue the online meltdown. “Figma is doomed!” “Fire the CTO!” The internet, in its infinite wisdom, declared. I wrote a news item on it for InfoQ and thought, let’s put things into perspective.

(Source: Figma.com)

But let’s inject a dose of reality, shall we? As Corey Quinn from The Duckbill Group, who probably sees more AWS invoices than you’ve seen Marvel movies, rightly points out, this kind of spending for a company like Figma is boringly normal.

As Quinn extensively details in his blog post, Figma isn’t running a simple blog. It’s a compute-intensive, real-time collaborative platform serving 13 million monthly active users and 450,000 paying customers. It renders complex designs with sub-100ms latency. This isn’t just about spinning up a few virtual machines; it’s about providing a seamless, high-performance experience on a global scale.

The Numbers Game: What the Armchair Experts Missed About Figma AWS Costs

The initial panic conveniently ignored a few crucial realities, according to Quinn:

Ramping Spend: Most large AWS contracts increase year-over-year. A $109 million annual average over five years likely starts lower (e.g., $80 million) and gradually increases to a higher figure (e.g., $150 million in year five) as the company expands.
Post-Discount Figures: These spend targets are post-discount. At Figma’s scale, they’re likely getting a significant discount (think 30% effective discount) on their cloud spend. So, their “retail” spend would be closer to $785 million over five years, not $545 million.

When you factor these in, Figma AWS costs fall squarely within industry benchmarks for its type of business:

Compute-lite SaaS: around 5% of revenue
Compute-heavy platforms (like Figma): 10–15% of revenue
AI/ML-intensive companies: often exceeding 15%

At 12% of revenue, Figma’s AWS costs are exactly where you’d expect them to be for a platform delivering real-time collaborative experiences at a global scale.

Furthermore, the increasing adoption of AI and Machine Learning in application development is introducing a new dimension to cloud costs. AI workloads, particularly for training and continuous inference, are incredibly resource-intensive, pushing the boundaries of compute, storage, and specialized hardware (like GPUs), which naturally translates to higher cloud bills. This makes effective FinOps and cost optimization strategies even more crucial for companies that leverage AI at scale.

So, while the internet was busy getting its math wrong and forecasting doom, Figma was operating within a completely reasonable range for its business model and scale.

The “Risky Dependency” Non-Story

Another popular narrative was the “risky dependency” on AWS. Figma’s S-1 filing includes standard boilerplate language about vendor dependencies, a common feature found in virtually every cloud-dependent company’s SEC filings. It’s the legal equivalent of saying, “If the sky falls, our business might be affected.”

Breaking news: a SaaS company that uses a cloud provider might be affected by outages. In related news, restaurants depend on food suppliers. This isn’t groundbreaking insight; it’s just common business risk disclosure. Figma’s “deep entanglement” with AWS, as described by Hacker News commenter nevon, illustrates the complexity of modern cloud architectures. Every aspect, from permissions to disaster recovery, is seamlessly integrated. That makes a quick migration akin to open-heart surgery. Not something you do on a whim.

Cloud Repatriation: A Valid Strategy, But Not a Universal Panacea

Figma’s costs reignited the cloud repatriation debate. The most vocal advocate is 37signals CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, who famously exited the cloud to save millions. And he’s not wrong for some companies; repatriating workloads delivers significant savings. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every company’s needs are different. Scrimba, for example, runs on dedicated servers and spends less than 1% of revenue on infrastructure. For them, repatriation is a perfect fit. Figma is a different story. Its real-time collaborative demands and massive user base require agility, scalability, and managed services at a global scale. A hyperscale provider like AWS isn’t optional; it’s central to the business model.

This brings us to a broader conversation, especially relevant in Europe: digital sovereignty. As I’ve discussed in my blog post, “Digital Destiny: Navigating Europe’s Sovereignty Challenge,” deep integration with a single hyperscaler isn’t just a cost question. It also affects the control an organization retains over its data and operations. Vendor lock-in carries real strategic implications. Data governance, regulatory compliance, and negotiating power can all be compromised. The extraterritorial reach of foreign laws adds another layer of concern. Many organizations are responding by exploring multi-cloud strategies or hybrid models. The goal: mitigate risk and assert greater control over their digital destiny.

My Cloud Anecdote: Costs vs. Value

This whole debate reminds me of a scenario I encountered back in 2017. I was working on a proof of concept for a customer, building a future-proof knowledge base using Cosmos DB, the Graph Model, and Search. The operating cost, primarily driven by Cosmos DB, was approximately 1,000 euros per month. Some developers immediately flagged it as “too expensive,” as I can recall, or even thought I was selling Cosmos DB. The reception, however, wasn’t universally positive. In fact, one attendee later wrote in their blog:

The most uninteresting talk of the day came from Steef-Jan Wiggers, who, in my opinion, delivered an hour-long marketing pitch for CosmosDB. I think it’s expensive for what it currently offers, and many developers could architect something with just as much performance without needing CosmosDB.

However, the proposed solution was for a knowledge base that customers could leverage via a subscription model. The crucial point was that the costs were negligible compared to the potential revenue the subscription model would net for the customer. It was an investment in a revenue-generating asset, not just a pure expense.

The Bottom Line: Putting Figma AWS Costs in Perspective

Thanks to Quinn, I understand that Figma is actively optimizing its infrastructure, transitioning from Ruby to C++ pipelines, migrating workloads, and implementing dynamic cluster scaling. He concluded:

They’re doing the work. More importantly, they’re growing at 46% year-over-year with a 91% gross margin. If you’re losing sleep over their AWS bill while they’re printing money like this, you might need to reconsider your priorities.

The “innovation <-> optimization continuum” is always at play. Companies often prioritize rapid innovation and speed to market, leveraging the cloud for its agility and flexibility. As they scale, they can then focus on optimizing those costs, and Figma AWS costs are no exception to that pattern.

This increasing complexity underscores the growing importance of FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations), a cultural practice that brings financial accountability to the variable-spend model of cloud computing, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions about cloud usage and optimize costs without sacrificing innovation.

Figma’s transparency in disclosing its cloud costs is actually a good thing. It forces a much-needed conversation about the true cost of running enterprise-scale infrastructure in 2025. The hyperbolic reactions, however, expose a fundamental misunderstanding of these realities. Which I also encountered with my Cosmos DB project in 2017.

So, the next time someone tells you that a company spending 12% of its revenue on infrastructure that literally runs its entire business is “doomed,” perhaps ask them how much they think it should cost to serve real-time collaborative experiences to 13 million users across the globe. When you understand what drives Figma AWS costs, the answer might surprise you.

Lastly, as the cloud landscape continues to evolve, with new services, AI integration, and shifting geopolitical considerations, the core lesson remains: smart cloud investment isn’t about avoiding the bill, but understanding its true value in driving business outcomes and strategic advantage. The dialogue about cloud costs is far from over, but it’s time we grounded it in reality.

Should developers care about Azure Cost?

Posted on February 14, 2022 by steefjan1970

The days of prepurchasing a large amount of infrastructure are gone. Instead, in the Cloud, we deal with buying small units of resources at a low cost. As a result, developers have the freedom to provision resources and deploy their apps. They can spend company money at a click of a button or line of code. There is no longer a need to go through any procurement process.

Therefore you could ask the question: Should developers be aware of the running costs of their apps and belonging infrastructure? And also worry about SKU’s, dimensioning, and unattended resources? I would say yes, they should be aware. Depending on requirements, environments (dev, test, acceptance, and production), availability, security, test strategy, and so on, costs will accumulate. Having an eye on the cost from the start will prevent discussion when the bill is too high at the end of the month or lacks justifying of the chosen deployment of Azure resources.

Fortunately, there are services and tools available to help you in the estimation of costs, monitoring, and analysis for cost optimization. Furthermore, you can help identify costs by applying tags to your Azure resources – important when costs of Azure resources in a subscription are shared over departments.

Azure Calculator

Microsoft provides a Cloud Platform called Azure containing over 100 services for its customers. They are charged for most of the services when consuming them. These charges (cost) can be estimated using the so-called ‘Pricing calculator.’

You can search for a product (service) with the pricing calculator and subsequently select it.

Next, a pop window on the right-hand side will appear, and you click on view. Finally, a window will appear with the options for, in this case, Logic Apps. You can select the region where you like to provision your product (service), and depending on hosting, other criteria specify what you like to consume. In addition, you can select what type of support you want and licensing model – and there is also a switch allowing you to see what the dev/test pricing is for the product.

Furthermore, if you want to estimate a solution consisting of multiple products, you can select all of them before specifying the consumption characteristics. The calculator will, in the end, show the accumulated costs for all products.

Other tabs in the calculator showcase sample scenarios to calculate the cost potential savings when already running resources in Azure and FAQs. And lastly, at the bottom, you can click purchasing options for the product(s).

More details of Azure pricing are available on the pricing landing page.

Considerations Cost Calculator

An Azure calculator is a tool for estimating and not actual costs generated by a client when using the products. It depends on the workload, the number of environments, sizing, and support costs (not just from Microsoft itself, yet also the cost of those managing the product from the client-side). Using the tool can be a good starting point to provide the client a feeling of the cost generation of potential workloads that run on the platform. Furthermore, you can also use the tool to perform an overall calculation by including multiple environments, sizing, and support leveraging Excel. In addition, there is also a TCO calculator through the Azure pricing landing page.

Cost Management

The cost management + billing service and features are available in any subscription in the Azure portal. It will allow you to do administrative tasks around billing, set spending thresholds, and proactively analyze azure cost generation. For example, in the Azure Portal, under Cost Management and Billing, you can find Budgets to create a budget for your costs in your subscription. In the create budget, you can define thresholds on actual and forecasted costs, manage an action group, specify emails (recipients for alerts) and language.

Considerations Cost Management

A key aspect regarding cost control is to set up budgets (mentioned earlier) at the beginning once a subscription before workloads land or resources are provisioned to develop cloud solutions. Furthermore, once consumption of Azure resources starts, you can look at recommendations for cost optimizations and Costs Analysis. For instance, the cost analysis (preview) can show the cost per resource group and services.

It is recommended to separate workloads per subscription as per the subscription decision guide. And one of the benefits is splitting out costs and keeping them under control with budgets. And lastly, Azure Advisor can help identify underutilized or unused resources to be optimized or shut down.

Tagging

Tagging Azure resources is a good practice. A tag is a key-value pair and is helpful to identify your resource. You can order your resource with, for instance, a key environment and value dev (development) and a key identifying the department with value marketing. Moreover, you can add various tags (key/values), up to 50. Each tag name (key) is limited to 512 characters and values to 256 characters. More information on limitations is available on the Microsoft docs.

Tagging Considerations

With tags, you can assign helpful information to any resource within your cloud infrastructure – usually information not included in the name of available in the overview of the resource. Tagging is critical for cost management, operations, and management of resources. More details on how to apply them are available in the decision guide. Furthermore, you can enforce tagging through Azure policies – see the Microsoft documentation on policy definitions for tag compliance.

Reporting

Stakeholders in Azure projects will be interested in cost accumulation for workloads in subscriptions. Therefore, reports of resource consumption in the euro, for example, are required. These reports can be viewed in the Azure Portal under Cost Management and Billing. However, you will need filters in the cost analysis or use the preview functionality to be more specific. Or you can export the data to a storage account and hook it up to PowerBI, or use third-party tooling like CloudCtrl.

And finally, as a developer, you can also leverage the available APIs to get costs and usage data. For example, the Azure Consumption APIs give you programmatic access to cost and usage data for your Azure resources. With the data, you can build reports.

Reports considerations

With costs, reports are essential to realize who the target audience is, what information they are looking for and how to present it. In addition, each active resource consumes the Azure infrastructure inside a data center, leading to cost. And cost should represent value in the end. Hence, reporting is critical for stakeholders in your cloud projects. The analysis of costs is in good hands with the cost analysis capabilities; however, the presentation requirements might differ and sometimes require a custom report by leveraging, for instance, PowerBI or a third-party tool.

Wrap up

In this blog post, we discussed Azure cost and hopefully made it clear that developers should care about cost, and they have tools and services available to make life easier. For example, they can set up cost management infrastructure themselves in their dev/test subscriptions if not already enforced or done by IT. Furthermore, they can make IT and the architect(s) aware of it if it is not in place. In the end, I believe it is a shared responsibility of developers and IT responsible for managing the Azure environments/subscriptions.

Cloud Perspectives

Steef-Jan Wiggers

Tag Archives: Cost Management