[matt_s]

Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.

I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.

I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.

[mark_l_watson]

Exactly right! Start with a $5/month VPS, then as needed upgrade to $10, $30, $60 a month. Then switch to scalable cloud.