[monlockandkey]

Don't use AWS, GCP or Azure. Use Digital Ocean and the likes. Cheap VM compute, managed databases. And for the most effective setup, just get an affordable VM and chuck https://dokku.com/ onto it. Boom you have your self hosted Heroku. Cheap bandwidth, opportunity to scale.

AWS is a fools errand at the startup level unless you need some of their specialised services. Stick to "tier 2" cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Linode. If all you need is servers, database and storage, then don't waste your money on the major cloud providers. They are the wrong choice for basic compute.