I cut my AWS bill by 93% by ditching Fargate for a single Lightsail VM

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 qualit