Totally agree. Something I find myself thinking/saying more and more is "don't underestimate what you can accomplish with a $5 VPS". Maybe a little hyperbolic,

Totally agree. Something I find myself thinking/saying more and more is "don't underestimate what you can accomplish with a $5 VPS". Maybe a little hyperbolic, but computers are really fast these days. Elastic resources are pretty magical when you need them, but the majority of software projects just don't end up requiring as many resources as devs/management often seem to assume. Granted, migrating to something like AWS, if you do end up needing it, is a pain, but so is adding unnecessary layers of AWS complexity for your CRUD app/API backend. Also wonder how many devs came up on AWS and prefer it for familiarity and not having to know and worry too much about aspects of deployment outside of the code itself (i.e not having to know too much about managing postgres, nginx, etc).