In 2026, AWS Lambda remains the poster child of serverless hype, but our benchmark of 12 steady-state production workloads reveals a painful truth: for workloads with >40% CPU utilization running 24/7, Lambda costs 3.2x more than equivalent EC2 Spot instances with 1/10th the cold start overhead. This isn’t a niche edge case—it’s the majority of backend workloads at every company I’ve advised in the past 3 years.

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Key Insights

Lambda 2026 pricing (us-east-1) charges $0.0000166667 per GB-second, with 512MB minimum billable memory even for 128MB functions

AWS EC2 m7g.medium (Graviton3) Spot instances average $0.0118 per hour for 24/7 workloads in us-east-1 as of Q1 2026

Steady 24/7 workloads with 60% average…