In its S‑1 IPO filing, collaborative design platform Figma disclosed a cloud hosting expense of nearly $300,000 per day on Amazon Web Services. This amounts to a pledged minimum of $545 million in AWS services over the next five years following a contract renewal on May 31, 2025
📊 Why Is This So Significant?
- Explosive scale: At roughly $298,467 daily, Figma’s AWS commitment underlines a massive reliance on cloud infrastructure to support millions of simultaneous users
- Core dependency risks: The company admits that its platform is fully dependent on AWS performance and subject to changes in AWS’s service terms
- No usage breakdown: The filing doesn’t specify how much of the cost is compute, storage, or bandwidth—though Figma uses large-scale embeddings and search capabilities, which are compute-heavy
🛠️ Behind the AWS Bill: Figma’s Architecture
- AI-powered search: Figma generates and indexes billions of embeddings for UI elements—requiring substantial compute and storage figma.com.
- Optimization efforts: To manage costs, Figma shifted from Ruby to C++ pipelines, moved thumbnailing to CPU, debounced indexing, and scaled clusters dynamically
- Infrastructure evolution: The firm also transitioned from AWS ECS to Kubernetes (EKS) to better optimize cost, resilience, and developer efficiency
📌 Why It Matters
- IPO spotlight: Figma’s public filing invites scrutiny over high cloud expenditures and margins.
- Cloud vendor concentration: Their reliance on AWS highlights both strengths and vulnerability to vendor policy shifts.
- Cost management at scale: Even top-tier engineering efforts are essential to rein in cloud costs.
- SaaS blueprint: The challenge facing similar high-growth platforms—balancing performance, reliability, and soaring cloud bills.
🔮 What’s Next?
- Monitor Figma’s margin outlook post-IPO—seeing if rising AWS costs squeeze profitability.
- Watch for cloud migration strategies; could Figma consider hybrid or multi-cloud models?
- Track whether AWS renegotiates terms or adjusts pricing amid mounting multi-million-dollar contracts.
✅ Bottom Line
Figma’s revelation of a $300K-per-day AWS spend underscores the immense scale and cost of modern SaaS infrastructure. As Figma heads toward IPO, managing cloud addiction, vendor risk, and margin impact will be central to its financial narrative.