Fixed-Cost Static Hosting vs Pay-Per-Snapshot Chromatic: Which is cheaper for low-traffic Storybook sites?

Goal

Determine the most cost‑effective deployment strategy for a Storybook site that receives minimal traffic but requires occasional visual regression testing.

Constraints

• The site is built with build-storybook and will be served as a static bundle from an object‑storage CDN (e.g., Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, or S3). The recurring cost of such a host is near‑zero for low traffic, but the bundle size is fixed regardless of visitors.

• Chromatic offers a free snapshot tier that incurs charges only when snapshots or visual reviews exceed the free quota. Pricing scales with the number of snapshots rather than visitor volume.

• Storybook 8 uses Vite by default, which can produce smaller bundles than Storybook 7’s Webpack; however, the static build still contains all stories and addons.

Unresolved Decision

Which approach yields the lowest total cost for a low‑traffic Storybook site that occasionally needs visual regression reviews?

Specific Questions

1. How does the fixed CDN hosting cost compare to Chromatic’s snapshot pricing for a site with X stories and Y daily visitors?
2. Does the bundle‑size reduction in Storybook 8’s Vite build sufficiently lower CDN bandwidth costs to offset Chromatic’s free‑tier limitations?
3. Under what traffic or review‑volume scenarios does Chromatic’s free tier become more expensive than a static‑hosting solution?