In that case, you can still just use AWS Lightsail. It’s a simple service where you just spin up an EC2 and pay one price for VPC and an allotment of outbound data (inbound is free). You never have to worry about costs going out of control, VPCs, networking etc.

When you do need to graduate to real AWS, you can and your former Lightsale set up is treated like a VPC you can peer to.

Except for the DB. The official way to migrate from a Lightsail DB to RDS is to do a logical dump and restore.

For MySQL, or if you have a monotonic column in Postgres, that might be doable if you dumped in parallel, but otherwise it’s an unacceptable amount of downtime when you reach the limits of Lightsail.

It is baffling to me that AWS doesn’t offer a one-click option to B/G from Lightsail —> RDS, as that’s a very reasonable growth pattern for many startups.