TL;DR I built ToolMango , an AI tools directory, on AWS Fargate. The bill came back at $345/mo before traffic . I migrated to a single $12 Lightsail VM in an afternoon and cut costs by 93% while keeping the same Next.js + Postgres + Redis + BullMQ stack alive. Here's exactly what I changed, what broke, and what I'd do differently. What ToolMango is (so the cost numbers make sense) ToolMango is an editorial directory of AI tools. It scores tools on an ROI Score (cost, time-to-value, output quality, free-tier generosity, category fit, reader engagement) and ranks them — before knowing whether the tool has an affiliate program. Tools we don't earn from frequently outrank tools we do. Tech stack: Next.js 14 App Router Postgres 16 Redis (BullMQ for the agent job queue) Anthropic Claude Sonnet for editorial agents (research, SEO sweep, social drafts) A worker process running 5 cron schedules Pre-revenue. Brand new domain. ~106 tools indexed at the time of writing.…