Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.

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Figma's $550 million AWS contract over five years represents about 12% of their revenue, which is completely normal for compute-intensive platforms. The internet overreacted to this disclosure, with many misunderstanding that enterprise AWS contracts include significant discounts and that real-time collaborative platforms require substantial infrastructure investment. Industry benchmarks show compute-heavy platforms typically spend 10-15% of revenue on cloud infrastructure, making Figma's spending reasonable given their 13 million monthly active users and 91% gross margin.

Figma’s $300k Daily AWS Bill Isn’t the Scandal You Think It Is

<p>Industry benchmarks show compute-heavy platforms typically spend 10-15% of revenue on cloud infrastructure… and what about compute-heavy platforms that don’t use cloud infrastructure ?</p>
