AWS offers at least four ways to host a SaaS, from near-effortless to full-control. Here are the four paths, what they cost in time and money, and how to choose based on your team.
From most managed to most manual. The further down, the more you control — and the more you manage.
Amplify or Lambda: the least infra possible, you stay on the product.
ECS/Fargate: clean containers, managed scale, no sysadmin.
EC2: legacy PHP, GPU, precise config, or floor cost at constant load.
RDS for the database, S3 for files. That doesn’t change with the compute.
The compute choice deserves its own article: EC2, ECS or Lambda: how I choose.
Whatever the compute, the data architecture is the same: managed database on RDS (never on the compute’s disk), files and media on S3 served by CloudFront. That decoupling is what makes the whole thing robust and scalable.
This architecture is detailed in why AWS for an e-commerce and its sequel scale without blowing the budget.
AWS is more verbose than Vercel, but often cheaper at scale — provided you watch it. The classic trap: underestimating peripheral costs (data transfer, NAT, snapshots).
Set a budget with an alert from day one. The line items that drift are in the 5 lines that wreck your bill.
AWS doesn't force a choice between simplicity and control: Amplify to start, ECS when it grows, EC2 when you want to own everything — always with RDS and S3 as the foundation. Choose for your team today, not for the scale you hope for.
AWS — SaaS on AWS ↗