This seems to (strangely) be an unpopular answer here, but I've spent a weekend to terraform everything. I run a couple of different projects which are yet to pick-up traction, so prototyping quickly is essential.

What I have now is terraform on Github which handles Networking (VPC, subnets), ECS/ECR, ALB for my backend and S3/CloudFront for frontend.

Everything is on AWS because I'm familiar with it, so it's faster. And I compensate for costs with AWS Activate + Free Tier. This combination is usually enough to understand whether the project will get traction or not.

Actually spending little time on IaC was one of the best recent investments. But I guess it holds more value when you have a couple of projects, still exploring and these tasks get repetitive

I spent a lot of time on Terraform + Packer code to set up VPC, RDS, Route53, AWS Cert Manager, ELB, EC2, my API server, S3, CloudFront, and CloudWatch. The setup had a lot of complexity and footguns. Plus there was the risk of accidentally running up a huge AWS bill.

Later, I realized that Heroku + Netlify are good enough. Switching was easy. The hardest part was admitting to myself that I had wasted so much time on AWS. I felt relieved after I deleted the Terraform and Packer code.

AWS bill is a concern. I put alerts on billing but they do come with a delay.

I was thinking Digital Ocean. Or Heroku for the current project, but ended up with a design with quite a few serverless pieces using lambda. Which has a great free tier and is very useful for my use-case.

Would not say that AWS is too much complexity though.. When you go over things at least once and understand how thing fall together

I find this helpful for my side project as well. It's amazing how quickly a) things break down and b) I forget how to set things up and get running again if I have to shelve and restart work on a project.