If you’re an indie dev building your first SaaS, AWS is not your friend.
It’s a maze of services, dashboards, and acronyms pretending to make you productive while quietly billing you for curiosity.
Sure, it’s “the industry standard.” But here’s the thing: you’re not Netflix. You’re not Stripe. You don’t need fifteen managed services to ship an MVP. You just need one working prototype in front of users.
When I started shipping my own SaaS projects, I defaulted to AWS too. Everyone said it was the “serious” choice. I spun up EC2s, tinkered with VPCs, IAM roles, and CloudWatch dashboards.
Two weeks later, my app still wasn’t live. But my bill was.
That’s when it clicked. AWS is optimized for scale, not speed. It’s designed for teams with DevOps pipelines, budgets, and compliance officers. Indie devs have none of those.
Here’s the real problem:
AWS makes you feel productive because it has a service for everything.
But it slows you down because you end up assembling infrastructure instead of shipping software.
You’re busy wiring VPCs while your users are waiting for a login page.
If you’re building your first SaaS, you’re better off with:
Render or Fly.io for fast deploys.
Railway, Supabase if you love simplicity.
DigitalOcean app platform
Or even your own K3s box on a $30 DigitalOcean droplet if you like to tinker.(More on this in future posts)
You’ll have full control, predictable costs, and a deploy story you can explain in a single sentence.
That’s what matters at your stage — not five-nines availability across three regions.
AWS will always have its place. It’s incredible at running serious workloads, regulated systems, and multi-tenant platforms at scale.
But for indie devs trying to launch, learn, and iterate fast — it’s overkill.
Use the simplest stack that lets you ship.
Add complexity only when success forces you to.
Because nothing kills momentum faster than debugging IAM policies instead of building features.
TL;DR
If you’re a solo founder or small team, your advantage isn’t scale — it’s speed.
Don’t trade that away for a cloud that was never built for you.