For most multi-tenant SaaS, the default still rhymes: PostgreSQL on Aurora, behind an API, in a private subnet. Stable, well-understood, the shape you'd draw on a whiteboard.
But I keep feeling a mismatch between what that shape costs and what it actually does while a product is small or bursty. A lot of the time, Vercel + Cloudflare + Supabase or Neon would give me similar real-world performance for less. And yet I get pulled back to AWS and Aurora — not for raw performance, but for enterprise requirements: VPC isolation, audit posture, "it has to live in our AWS org."
What changed for me is the third option in that fork. It used to be "cheap edge stack or heavy AWS stack." Now there's a middle path: keep the AWS/Aurora skeleton the enterprise wants, but redesign it so it stops costing like it's always on — and reach that redesign by sparring with an AI against a real dev deployment, instead of needing to already be an infra specialist.
Here's the whole idea in one picture:
BEFORE — everything flows through Aurora
