Stats
Hard numbers. Live data. Cloud cost math. Everything is verifiable.
cochranblock.org vs Defense Industry
| Metric | cochranblock.org | Booz Allen | Leidos | SAIC | CACI |
| First Paint | 252ms | 448ms | 572ms | 240ms | 360ms |
| DOM Complete | 250ms | 631ms | 1,186ms | 515ms | 629ms |
| CLS | 0.0000 | 0.0083 | 0.0047 | 0.0232 | 0.0105 |
| Page Weight | 117 KB | 3,432 KB | 4,949 KB | 2,238 KB | 4,403 KB |
| Requests | 18 | 74 | 53 | 123 | 181 |
| Scripts | 2 | 36 | 14 | 48 | 109 |
| DOM Elements | 129 | 2,050 | 1,015 | 890 | 1,069 |
| Server | 10 MB binary | cloud cluster | cloud cluster | cloud cluster | cloud cluster |
| Monthly Cost | $10 | millions | millions | millions | millions |
At Scale: 50,000 Visitors
What happens when 50,000 people hit the front page?
| Site | Page Weight | Data Transfer | vs Us |
| cochranblock.org | 117 KB | 5.6 GB | — |
| leidos.com | 4,949 KB | 235.7 GB | 42x more |
| caci.com | 4,403 KB | 209.6 GB | 38x more |
| boozallen.com | 3,432 KB | 163.4 GB | 29x more |
| saic.com | 2,238 KB | 106.5 GB | 19x more |
Why our binary handles it and their cloud breaks
Rust + tokio: Each connection uses ~8 KB (async task, no thread). 50,000 × 8 KB = 390 MB RAM. Pre-compiled response — no template rendering, no DB query. Done in ~1 second on 4 cores.
Their cloud stack: Each Node.js/Java container needs 256–512 MB baseline. 50,000 ÷ 1,500 req/sec = 34 containers × 384 MB = 12.8 GB RAM. Kubernetes autoscaler takes 30–120 seconds to boot new pods. By the time they scale up, our binary already served everyone.
Cloud Cost: Full Stack Replacement
A single Rust binary replaces the entire cloud stack. Real pricing from published rate cards.
| Component | AWS | Azure | GCP | Rust Binary |
| Compute | $613/mo | $292/mo | $2,144/mo | $10/mo |
| Load Balancer | $215/mo | $246/mo | $30/mo | built-in |
| Database | $98/mo | $75/mo | $54/mo | built-in (sled) |
| Cache | $97/mo | $162/mo | $173/mo | built-in |
| NAT Gateway | $42/mo | $42/mo | $9/mo | $0 |
| CDN + WAF | $29/mo | $21/mo | $17/mo | Cloudflare free |
| Monitoring + Logs | $5/mo | $14/mo | $6/mo | built-in |
| Total (monthly) | $1,099 | $849 | $2,433 | $10 |
| Total (annual) | $13,184 | $10,184 | $29,194 | $120 |
| Reduction | 110x | 85x | 243x | — |
The NAT Gateway tax
The most expensive line item nobody sees coming. AWS charges $32.40/month fixed plus $0.045/GB — just so your containers can reach the internet. Azure: $32.85/month. Your containers can't egress without it.
Our binary talks directly to Cloudflare. NAT Gateway cost: $0.
Deploy model
Their deploy: Docker build → push to ECR/ACR/Artifact Registry → Helm chart → Kubernetes manifest → rolling update → health check → autoscaler policy → CloudWatch alarm → SNS → Lambda. 14+ services. Terraform state. IAM policies. Security groups.
Our deploy: scp one file. Update: scp one file. Rollback: scp one file.
ROI
$3,500 deployment — pays for itself in 37 days
You're spending $2,940/month on cloud. We deploy a binary that replaces it for $3,500. Day 1: you stop paying AWS. Day 37: deployment fee recovered. Day 365: you've saved $32,380. Every year after: $35,880 stays in your pocket.
37signals saved $10M leaving AWS
In 2022, 37signals (Basecamp, HEY) spent $3.2M/year on AWS. Moved to owned hardware. Saved $10M over five years. DHH: "Renting computers is mostly a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours." The math scales down. A startup spending $3K/month saves $32K+ in year one with the same approach.
Live Traffic — 30 Days
CF data unavailable — requires CF_TOKEN.
Repo Activity — 30 Days
REPO COMMITS NODES LAST PUSH ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── kova 214 1 2026-04-03 █████████████████████████ cochranblock 148 1 2026-03-31 █████████████████ pixel-forge 109 1 2026-03-30 ████████████ exopack 29 1 2026-04-03 ███ illbethejudgeofthat 28 1 2026-04-03 ███ ghost-fabric 26 1 2026-04-03 ███ call-shield 26 1 2026-04-03 ███ provenance-docs 22 1 2026-04-03 ██ any-gpu 17 1 2026-04-02 █ approuter 13 1 2026-03-11 █ oakilydokily 11 1 2026-03-11 █ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── TOTAL 643
Daily Commits (all repos)
DATE COMMITS ────────────────────────────────────────────────── 2026-03-11 66 █████████████████████████ 2026-03-12 32 ████████████ 2026-03-13 5 █ 2026-03-14 5 █ 2026-03-16 17 ██████ 2026-03-17 23 ████████ 2026-03-18 25 █████████ 2026-03-19 46 █████████████████ 2026-03-20 22 ████████ 2026-03-21 5 █ 2026-03-22 29 ███████████ 2026-03-23 22 ████████ 2026-03-24 17 ██████ 2026-03-25 10 ███ 2026-03-26 38 ██████████████ 2026-03-27 79 ██████████████████████████████ 2026-03-28 21 ███████ 2026-03-29 26 █████████ 2026-03-30 32 ████████████ 2026-03-31 11 ████ 2026-04-01 1 2026-04-02 44 ████████████████ 2026-04-03 67 █████████████████████████ ────────────────────────────────────────────────── TOTAL 643
Verify Everything
Run your own test
# Page size (HTML only)
curl -s https://cochranblock.org/ | wc -c
# Total transfer time
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "TTFB: %{time_starttransfer}s\nTotal: %{time_total}s\nSize: %{size_download} bytes\n" https://cochranblock.org/
# Count JavaScript tags (should be 0 on homepage)
curl -s https://cochranblock.org/ | grep -c '<script'
# Compare to any other site
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{size_download}" https://boozallen.com/
Page weights measured via Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) with cache disabled — real browser render, not HTML scraping. Tool: whobelooking perf (Rust + chromiumoxide). CF data cached 30 min. Cloud pricing: AWS/Azure/GCP US East, pay-as-you-go, April 2026.