I spent a lot of time on Terraform + Packer code to set up VPC, RDS, Route53, AWS Cert Manager, ELB, EC2, my API server, S3, CloudFront, and CloudWatch. The setup had a lot of complexity and footguns. Plus there was the risk of accidentally running up a huge AWS bill.
Later, I realized that Heroku + Netlify are good enough. Switching was easy. The hardest part was admitting to myself that I had wasted so much time on AWS. I felt relieved after I deleted the Terraform and Packer code.
AWS bill is a concern. I put alerts on billing but they do come with a delay.
I was thinking Digital Ocean. Or Heroku for the current project, but ended up with a design with quite a few serverless pieces using lambda. Which has a great free tier and is very useful for my use-case.
Would not say that AWS is too much complexity though.. When you go over things at least once and understand how thing fall together
Later, I realized that Heroku + Netlify are good enough. Switching was easy. The hardest part was admitting to myself that I had wasted so much time on AWS. I felt relieved after I deleted the Terraform and Packer code.