Clients think websockets are magic until the bill comes

Built a realtime dashboard for a client that updates every second with sensor data. They loved the demo, signed off immediately. “Make it just like this!”So we did. Went live with 500 concurrent users, websockets everywhere, everything updating in realtime. Looked beautiful. Then I check aws billing end of month and our data transfer is $3200. I’m like what the fuck? Client sees the invoice and absolutely loses it.Had to go back and basically dumb it down. Most stuff now polls every 10 seconds, only kept websockets for critical alerts that actually need instant updates. Bill drops to like $400 and suddenly client is happy again.I don’t even pitch real time features in demos anymore without showing them what it’s gonna cost. Yeayyh that was an expensive lesson. via /r/webdev https://ift.tt/Bi2qn7J