The monthly figure is my operating recollection. I still need to reconcile it against AWS Cost Explorer, so it is not a cloud-price quote.
AccurayLab distributed cases, accepted DICOM result files, ran evaluations, stored the results, and maintained a leaderboard. Seven final plans went through the full workflow. I remember the infrastructure landing around ₩400,000 a month.
That sounds like the price of the platform until I list what the bill did not contain.
There are three different costs
| Cost | What I mean |
|---|---|
| Keeping the service alive | Application server, database, object storage, queue, logs, mail, and backups. |
| Evaluating submissions | CPU or GPU time, failed jobs, retries, finalist reruns, and retained artifacts. |
| Actually running the challenge | Writing rules, checking data, arguing about metrics, dry-runs, answering people, fixing incidents, verifying winners, and producing the final record. |
The first cost can be surprisingly small. The third is the product.
Why this challenge did not need an H100
Participants uploaded treatment-planning result objects. The platform did not train their models or rerun a large neural network for every submission. Most scoring work was ordinary CPU computation over DICOM and dose-volume information.
That experience does not transfer directly to 3D segmentation, pathology slides, or a medical VLM. Those may spend more on storage throughput or inference than on the web application itself.
How I would quote the next one
| Line item | How I would charge |
|---|---|
| Two-week discovery | Fixed fee to inspect the data, run representative models, choose metrics, and estimate the real workload. |
| Build and dry-run | Milestones with an agreed acceptance test. |
| Open operation | Based on duration, participant volume, support hours, and incident responsibility. |
| Compute | Measured usage or a capped allowance, shown separately. |
| Final verification | Number of finalist reruns and the depth of technical or clinical review. |
| Archive | Retention period, access, reporting, and deletion evidence. |
What I need before calling ₩400,000 a case study
I need the Cost Explorer export by month and service, the exact operating dates, storage and transfer, the number of submissions and retries, and any credits or tax. A credit-card statement is less useful and contains information that should never be published.
Until I have that, the honest version is narrow: I operated one real radiotherapy result-evaluation platform at approximately that monthly infrastructure level. It says nothing by itself about the price of the work.
← All field notes