Marginal Cost for Engineers: 10 Architecture Decisions That Secretly Inflate Your Costs
A few months back, a backend team at a fast-growing SaaS company shipped what seemed like a harmless feature. Just a simple request validation layer. No new service. No major dependencies. No architectural shock. Yet two months later, their cloud costs had climbed 38% without any significant increase in traffic, storage, or compute load. What they’d missed was that the validation layer triggered a fan-out pattern.