Does everyone here hate AWS?
I tweeted recently asking why more Indie Hackers don't use AWS services for their products.
It seems like learning the AWS infrastructure is too much of a barrier for most Indie hackers but IMO the learning curve is worth the payoff of how cheap AWS can be.
This got me thinking though,
Would it be useful to build a SaaS boilerplate with AWS for developers and Indie Hackers to jumpstart their projects?
Here's a link to the original tweet.
Trending on Indie Hackers
I think it's great, but if you don't need scale you shouldn't overengineer your stack. AWS practically encourages overengineering, so you might be better off being choosy about which parts of AWS you use rather than going down the serverless rabbit hole.
I agree, you shouldn't bother with services that don't apply to your MVP.
I have hotstoks.com running on AWS, it works great, it uses lambda, SQS, RDS and API Gateway but the learning curve and vendor lock in are a big barrier. I feel like everything is confusing and convoluted.
In my latest project neologin.co I decided to use Cloudflare workers and wow, what a breath of fresh air, it feels so much simpler and streamlined, setup is so easy, documentation is more coherent and great pricing.
I've heard good things about Vercel and Fly.io as well.
To me personally at the end of the day I think AWS has too much and i'm willing to pay a premium for simpler solutions that optimize for developer happiness.
Thanks for the insight. I also don't like the documentation and the confusion but I do like saving money. For me if you're going to be an indie hacker without much revenue coming in and you want to deploy multiple projects at scale and as cheaply as possible then AWS makes more sense than a premium option.
That said, if you just have one or two projects it's not terrible to use a more user friendly hosting service. I've heard of Fly and wish their pricing was a little clearer. I've used Render.com in the past and liked it but the cost was too high for something that wasn't making money.
Fun fact: Render has free plans now (and we'll offer more for free going forward): https://render.com/free
For AWS you can apply to their activate program for startups which was what I did for hotstoks.com and that got me over 1k in credits to soften the initial blow and it will keep me running for free for over a year. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
It's not just complexity. AWS is also very overpriced.
For the same money as a typical VPS, you'll get a server with worse listed specs that will sometimes be throttled still lower. Ditto for storage. Outgoing bandwidth has something like an 80x markup.
The engineer at Twitch who built much of their infra admitted himself that Amazon's Twitch-like video offering is simply too expensive for anyone else to make something like Twitch. The same can be said for many, many other offerings.
The one and only exception I can think of is SES. That's a great bargain.
I have to disagree with the sentiment that most of the services are overpriced. I do think that some services can be such as VPC from what little I know about it. But for the most part services like Lambda / s3 are dirt cheap unless you're doing something crazy and even then they seem to scale decently enough.