I’m interested in peoples experience with this and if it’s relatively true.

We (like many others I assume) pay more for Heroku than AWS as it allows us to “outsource” our dev ops. We are a small team (sub 15) with a decent sized, decade old app. We’ve had it on AWS before (and used platforms like BuildKite) but both required much more overhead (in terms of employee salary). Anecdotally I’ve heard the same from friends, though I understand AWS works well and is cheaper if you know AWS well.

> I’m interested in peoples experience with this and if it’s relatively true.

My personal experience is that AWS is always more expensive. You don't use AWS because of the cost saving you use it because:

* Top of the line h/w * Always the first to bring out new features * Very high availability of resource, like seriously I've never had a time even during the pandemic where they struggled with resource availability * Resilience of AWS systems are very high * Very good support

There was an article a few months back where a teams tried moving from Heroku to AWS to save money and ended up spending nearly 3x the amount. Heroku give more resource than you actually pay for by default and it turns out they were using the extra resource during normal operation. When they done their calcs for a switch to AWS they used the quoted resource that Heroku say you get and there system died due to being under resourced. They had to up the resource which pushed them well over their budget. I'll try and find the article.

Please Note: Heroku servers are on AWS already

AWS isn’t that bad when you use IaC like CDK. Clicking around in the console and trying to reproduce those steps when you have a new project or API is what will kill you