Your blog deserves to know it's being read. A Lambda function counts the views, DynamoDB remembers them, and it's all eligible for the Free Tier. Last updated: April 20, 2026 Most analytics tools require an account, a script tag, and a separate dashboard you have to check outside your infrastructure. If you're already on AWS, you can build a view counter that lives in your own account and stores data in a table you control. It takes about an hour, and all three services it uses are eligible for the AWS Free Tier. This tutorial walks you through building that counter. You add one Replace YOUR_COUNTER_URL with the URL from the deploy output. Here's what it looks like in an Astro blog layout, with the real endpoint URL: ← all posts

{title}

{formattedDate} {formattedUpdated && ( · updated {formattedUpdated} )}

Now every page load fires a request to your API, which counts the view and returns a 204. The window.location.pathname part means it automatically sends the current page's path, so you don't need to configure anything per post. Open the DynamoDB console, find your table, and click "Explore table items." If you have a lot of items, filter for items where sk equals counter. You'll see each page path and its view count. You can also run this from the CLI: aws dynamodb scan \ --table-name YOUR_TABLE_NAME \ --filter-expression "sk = :sk" \ --expression-attribute-values '{":sk": {"S": "counter"}}' This project uses services eligible for the AWS Free Tier. Depending on your usage and account status, charges may apply. Here's the breakdown: DynamoDB provisioned at 25 WCU/25 RCU is within the always-free tier. No cost regardless of account age. Lambda gives you 1 million requests per month free. Most personal blogs will stay within these limits. API Gateway is the only service with a direct cost: $3.50 per million requests for REST APIs in us-east-1. A blog getting 10,000 views per month would cost about $0.035, which comes out of your Free Tier credits if you're a new customer. I'd recommend setting up a billing alarm at $5 as a best practice in new sandbox accounts. If you followed along, you now have hands-on experience with: DynamoDB: composite keys, TTL for automatic cleanup, atomic counters with UpdateExpression Lambda: handling HTTP events, environment variables, working with the AWS SDK API Gateway: REST endpoints, CORS configuration, throttling CDK: defining infrastructure in TypeScript, deploying with a single command And you have something running on your blog that you built from scratch. If you want to tear everything down: npx cdk destroy -c blogOrigin=https://yourdomain.com This deletes the Lambda, the DynamoDB table, and the API Gateway endpoint. All your view count data will be gone, so make sure you're done with it. Add a billing alarm so you get an email if your AWS charges go above $5 Build a small dashboard that reads from DynamoDB and displays your view counts Track views over time by adding a date field to the counter records The source code for this project is on GitHub if you want to fork it and make it your own. Let me know in the comments what you're building this week!

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Build your own blog post view counter on AWS Free Tier