It wasn't really that the infrastructure was overkill, it was that scalable choices weren't made in the first place.

Remember, the comment I replied to said:

> As a software consultant myself, I'd probably stop the conversation right there and ask why they are building such a robust distributed system — SQS, SNS, etc — without any customers. Still want to be deployed in AWS? Toss the damn app on a single EC2 instance...

But in the article, it's pointed out that SQS and SNS would have been better choices at lower costs for low usage:

> When it comes to the application, if I had been involved from scratch, I would have recommended SQS and/or SNS for the message bus, which are free of charge at low utilization.

Basically, this company is in a pickle because they didn't have architecture experts from the beginning, and the development team started writing an application without much thought to areas where SRE and DevOps teams often get involved: scaling and cost optimization.

Which is another way to say that most startups seem to wait too long to hire DevOps/SRE teams because they are roles considered to be "cost centers:" work that is not directly contributing to the money-making business logic.