Skyform's own production system, built to plan, write, render and schedule Tech with Darin on serverless AWS. The cost and alarm numbers on this page are measured and dated, including the June and July cost spike and the August failures.
Tech with Darin publishes short videos, text posts, daily Substack Notes and a weekly newsletter. One person runs it. A standing server footprint with idle compute, or a pipeline that needed a human to babysit every post, would have eaten the value the automation created.
The bar had four parts. The pipeline does the repeatable work on a schedule, costs scale with use, a person signs off on what goes to other writers and to subscribers, and someone finds out when something breaks. Not from a reader.
As of September 2026, one CDK stack holds 29 application Lambda functions, 4 Step Functions state machines and 10 DynamoDB tables, all billed by use. With no idle servers to pay for, a quiet hour costs close to nothing.
EventBridge starts the daily run at 12:00 UTC and scores news feeds every 15 minutes. Step Functions runs the daily, breaking-news and video jobs with retries.
Claude Haiku 4.5 picks topics and drafts replies. Claude Sonnet 4.6 writes video scripts and drafts the weekly newsletter for Darin to review and publish. Both run on Amazon Bedrock, with Stable Image Core for images and Amazon Polly for voice, so there is no GPU fleet to operate. A Bedrock Guardrail screens the newsletter draft.
Monitoring started thin. An August 2026 review found 5 of the 8 daily runs from August 12 to 19 had failed, and some failures surfaced late or not at all. Alarms went from 13 to 22, the failing step became non-fatal, and every alarm now posts to Slack.
For September 1 to 27, 2026, the AWS lines attributed to the pipeline came to $55.97, about $60 a month. They came to about $327 in June and $345 in July. A renderer launched June 9 made every scene image at $0.14, and uncapped breaking news drove up to 151 images a day against about 8 needed. The July 22 fix capped breaking news at 2 stories a day and moved to a $0.04 image model. Image spend fell from $206 in July to $9.68 through September 27.
A person signs off at two points. From a signed Slack link, Darin approves or rejects each reply drafted to another writer on Substack. The newsletter lands as a draft, and only Darin publishes it. Skyform applies the same discipline to AI Build engagements and to Ridgeline, Skyform's own AWS cost advisor: measure the cost, and alarm on the failures that matter.
Costs are the AWS Cost Explorer service lines attributed to the pipeline, before tax, and leave out third-party subscriptions and APIs. September covers September 1 to 27, 2026. Stack and alarm counts are from the September 21, 2026 deploy. The output is public at techwithdarin.com.
An AI Build takes it to production in 6 to 10 weeks: agent, pipeline, or integration, with guardrails, alarms and cost controls in place before launch and 30 days of post-launch support. Public pricing, fixed scope.