[TheNewsIsHere]

They even said as much in TFA - "[...] overkill, yes we know, but to be fair we had AWS credits".

Fully acknowledging the irony I am about to invoke - this is why I hate startup culture. Not startups, but this ridiculous culture of "well the VC gave us a million bucks and that bought us $100,000 in AWS credits, so let's just use it."

As someone who has built my company fully on my own dime (and the dimes of two colleagues), it's easy enough to burn piles of money in AWS (or any other cloud) when you're making an attempt at being judicious. Spinning up eight backends (edit: running five instances each, no less!) just because you have money, despite the fact that you know you don't need that much compute, is just insane. If for no other reason than you're just throwing your own credits away.

[wg0]

A ten dollar Hetzner with dokku would do fine at this stage.

But then the whole startup culture is generally speaking, a culture of waste, pride and vanity.