The key words were "literally no money". By tiny startup I meant one or two people without any funding, revenue, and saddled with life expenses like rent, food,

The key words were "literally no money". By tiny startup I meant one or two people without any funding, revenue, and saddled with life expenses like rent, food, college savings, etc. I definitely agree that a DB on EC2 is tech debt. But sometimes that is something you have to accept for immediate financial reasons while you figure out how to create a product with revenue to cover costs.