Wordle at peak
Josh Wardle ran Wordle for millions of players on essentially static hosting — here's what that costs today.
At its viral peak, Wordle served a simple static page and a daily puzzle API to tens of millions of players. No accounts, no realtime — just compute at the edge and a tiny backend for the word list. We model it as a lightweight API-backend profile at 100k daily active players.
The sensible way
Railway stack at $23/mo
Run everything on Railway
At 100K DAU · fit score 100/100
Cost curve — top 3 stacks
Total monthly hosting cost at each traffic level (same app profile, different providers).
| DAU | Railway stack | Cloudflare-first stack | Vercel-first stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $8/mo | $3/mo | $3/mo |
| 1K | $8/mo | $3/mo | $3/mo |
| 10K | $8/mo | $9.20/mo | $23/mo |
| 100K | $23/mo | $40.40/mo | $319.40/mo |
Service breakdown — Railway stack
- App Service · RailwayPro$20/mo
- Redis · RailwayStarter$3/mo
These are real prices from our provider knowledge base, computed with the same engine as our stack reports.
Want numbers for your app?
Adjust traffic, storage, and requirements — get a full stack report in minutes.
Plan my stack — free