DIY authenticated static hosting costs $5–20/month in infrastructure — plus 1–2 days of engineering time to build and ongoing maintenance to run. display.dev is the managed version: $49/month flat, 15-minute setup, nothing to maintain.
| display.dev | DIY AWS Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly infrastructure cost | $49 | $5–20 |
| Setup time | 15 minutes | 1–2 days |
| Year 1 total cost (at $150/hr eng) | $588 | $3,480–$5,940 |
| Google + Microsoft SSO | ✅ | Complex federation |
| Publish CLI | ✅ | ❌ (custom scripts) |
| MCP integration | ✅ | ❌ |
| Maintenance required | ❌ | ✅ (ongoing) |
| No infrastructure to own | ✅ | ❌ |
The AWS stack costs look attractive: S3 storage, CloudFront bandwidth, and Cognito are cheap. $5–20/month in infrastructure.
The engineering cost is not cheap. Setting up S3 + CloudFront + Cognito + Lambda@Edge correctly takes 16–32 hours for a senior engineer. At $150/hour in fully-loaded cost, that's $2,400–$4,800 before you've served a single page.
Then: certificate renewals, Cognito API updates when Google or Microsoft changes their OAuth flows, Lambda@Edge version updates, IAM policy documentation for compliance. This infrastructure belongs to whoever built it. When they leave, it becomes an orphaned auth system no one wants to touch.
You have specific cloud provider requirements (AWS GovCloud, specific regions). You need network-level access control or device posture checks a SaaS can't provide. Your compliance framework requires on-premise deployment.
You don't want to maintain infrastructure. You need Google AND Microsoft SSO without complex federation. You want a CLI and MCP. You want compliance documentation to be "add to vendor register," not "document and evidence everything yourself."
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Authentication. Viewers click a link and sign in with their Google or Microsoft account, or a one-time password. No app to install. No account to create. No IT ticket.
Comments. Inline comments on every artifact. Your agent reads them via MCP, updates the document, resolves the thread. The artifact stays a living document, not a one-shot screenshot.
Publish in 15 seconds. dsp publish ./file.html from your terminal, or one sentence in Claude Desktop. No git repo, no deploy pipeline, no project to configure.
Permanent URLs. Every artifact gets a URL that keeps working. Share in Slack, link in Notion, paste in email. It still works six months later.
Unlimited viewers. No per-seat pricing at any tier. Share with your PM, exec, legal team, or designer for the same flat price.
Any agent. Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor all work, along with anything else that creates HTML or Markdown output. Not locked to one provider.
Infrastructure alone: yes, $5–20/month. Total cost including initial build and ongoing maintenance: no.
Yes. Run dsp publish on the same HTML files you're currently serving from S3. Update the links. Decommission the stack.
display.dev runs on managed infrastructure. You don't need to know or configure any of it.
Free tier. No credit card. One-time password auth on free, Google + Microsoft SSO on Teams ($49/month flat).