The 1,500 Dollar Day: The Egress Bill That Reframed Our Whole Strategy

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0530

When I moved transcoding to AWS MediaConvert, I wrote — almost as a footnote — that I had traded a compute problem for a bill I now had to watch. The compute problem was solved: uploads encoded in parallel, the queue stopped climbing, my Celery workers went back to doing app work. The bill was the part I had waved at and moved past. This chapter is that footnote coming to collect.

A 20-Minute Video Weighed 1.2 GB, So We Built Our Own Streaming

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The last stretch of work made the platform quick — a heavy course page that used to take thirty seconds now answered in about two hundred milliseconds, and the API felt solid enough to build real features on. So we finally turned to the thing we had been deliberately ignoring since the very early days: video. Back when we were still proving people would pay, I had left a landmine in the product on purpose. A single 20-minute course lesson was a 1.2 GB HD file, and we served that same giant file to everyone.

Cloudfront on Kuldeep Pisda

The 1,500 Dollar Day: The Egress Bill That Reframed Our Whole Strategy

A 20-Minute Video Weighed 1.2 GB, So We Built Our Own Streaming