Managed DX > DIY AWS: Small Teams Should Pay for Time and Scale-to-Zero

The video nails a boring truth: for small teams and side projects, managed DX-first platforms are cheaper in practice. Generous free tiers (Vercel, PlanetScale, Clerk) carry you far; scale-to-zero and caching mean you pay when users show up, not for idle servers. More importantly, engineer time is the real bill. Days spent wiring PG bouncers, CI/CD, and Terraform are days not shipping. Keep teams small, wire tools into real workflows, and measure by shipped outcomes—not by how clever your AWS is. Even on modern Java with Quarkus, outsource undifferentiated heavy lifting. Job security isn’t saving $100/month while burning $200k/year of focus.