What if there was someone involved who had built web applications than run on laptops before and made different architectural decisions than the path your company went down.
And what if they cost more than your entire AWS bill?
You seem to have misunderstanding on what scales some things run at, and expense curves of getting them to run at those levels.
A poorly built app running on hundreds of servers can be massively expensive. A well built app running on a single server can also be massively expensive because people that can build apps like that tend to command whatever price they want under the banner of server cost savings.
Can you build software this efficiently? If you can't, then being an armchair expert about it helps noone. If you can, you're undercharging your clients.
If my grandma had wheels she would have been a bike. Most of these decisions are made by someone very early on in the process, either a cofounder or an underpaid junior engineer, when the company has zero revenue and no PMF.
It's unrealistic to expect a startup to build a product (or at least it was prior to LLMs generating a lot of boilerplate) with best practices in place.
You seem to have misunderstanding on what scales some things run at, and expense curves of getting them to run at those levels.
A poorly built app running on hundreds of servers can be massively expensive. A well built app running on a single server can also be massively expensive because people that can build apps like that tend to command whatever price they want under the banner of server cost savings.
Can you build software this efficiently? If you can't, then being an armchair expert about it helps noone. If you can, you're undercharging your clients.