The 70%-cheaper backend: how Redis-fronted databases change cloud economics
The cloud database is the most expensive part of most B2B SaaS stacks. It does not have to be.
Look at your last invoice. The relational database line item is almost certainly in the top three. Often it is number one. The reason is not that databases are expensive in isolation (they are not) but that we ask them to do work they should not be doing.
The 95/5 rule
In most applications, 95% of traffic is reads and 5% is writes. The reads do not need a relational database; they need a fast view of relational data. The writes do need a relational database. So if you can serve the 95% from a much cheaper substrate, the bill collapses.
Redis is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper per request than SQL Server at scale. Move the 95% there and the math changes immediately. We routinely see 70% cost reductions on infrastructure, before any other optimization.
Why does not everyone already do this?
Because the integration is hard. We covered that in the last post. The economics are obvious. The implementation is not. That gap; the gap between "this would save us 70%" and "we shipped it"; is what redfly closes.
The point of a framework is not to be clever. The point of a framework is to make the obvious thing easy enough that everyone does it.