The title is actually understating things a bit. This is $0.21 dollars both for ~30k page views of a static file, but also a fairly involved data processing pipeline which feeds into the generation of that static file.

How do you scrape external websites in the frontend?

I guess you could rope some CI service with a free tier into service instead, updating a file on GitHub, but...

It should be possible to scrape the data with AWS lambda and then just push the results onto github and let the browser deal with the data. All for free.

Is such use of Github in compliance with their terms of service?

I've been thinking about using such public git providers to store small amounts of data, possibly encrypted. For example important documents that I don't want to lose. It seems that it'd be ok as long as you manually create the account.

Not really although you probably need to use quite a bit of traffic before it becomes a problem. Your example of personal use only seems fine.

There was a post here a while ago (that I cannot find anymore) about the devs of a package manager of sorts who were asked kindly by Github to do something about their excessive data usage. So it's probably not a good idea to build a company on it.

It was probably this- https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...

There are even package managers which host all their data / indexes on Github ( https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs/tree/master/Specs ). I personally also back up encrypted data on Github.

That sounds like working for $0.21 a month, since if you don't get rid of lambda you don't really create an alternative.

That sounds inefficient. Why force every client to repeat the work that can be done once on the server?

right, the delivery to the end user clearly could be optimized. I probably interpreted the parent comment wrongly.

yes, on GAE, this is far under the free quota.