Forte vs. AWS
Use AWS without assembling every service yourself.
AWS gives you every infrastructure building block. Forte connects those parts and runs them for you, with authentication, payments, and request debugging included.
Or go straight to the cost comparison.
Feature by feature
A straightforward look at how Forte compares to AWS.
| AWS | Forte | |
|---|---|---|
| What you assemble | VPC, ALB, NAT, ECS, ECR, WAF, Route 53, CloudWatch | ✓ Connect a repo. The infrastructure is already wired. |
| Time to first deploy | Days to weeks of infrastructure work | ✓ Minutes from git push |
| Deployment pipeline | CodePipeline plus a buildspec you write and maintain | ✓ Straight from GitHub on push to a branch, or on a published release |
| Fixed cost before any traffic | Load balancer, NAT gateways and log retention bill at idle | ✓ Provisioned compute only. No standing network charges. |
| Payments | ✗ Not included | ✓ Built in. Create subscriptions with one API call. |
| User authentication | ✗ Cognito to configure, or a third-party service | ✓ Built-in user auth and management |
| Debugging | CloudWatch Logs Insights queries you write | ✓ Trace any request by ID |
| Seat & platform fees | No seat fee. You pay for each resource and the time to run it. | ✓ No seat fees. Pay only for usage. |
| Network egress | $0.085/GB via CloudFront above the 1 TB free tier, plus NAT data processing | ✓ No egress fees for APIs, web traffic, or content. |
| Who runs it | You handle patching, scaling, on-call, and cost tuning | ✓ Forte, on the same AWS infrastructure |
| Lock-in | Your app plus the IaC around it | ✓ Runs any container. You own the image. |
Total cost of ownership
Choose a workload to compare monthly costs. The full breakdown stays visible below.
A small team with paying customers
1,200,000 req/mo · 2 × 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 10 GB database
Includes AWS and $51 in priced services.
Estimated at the selected workload
Estimated at the selected workload
Hover a bar for its complete breakdown. Every scale starts at zero.
Monthly cost
USD / monthDebugging & operating
Hours / month$216/mo less on Forte. That's about 66% cheaper for the same workload.
Estimated hours per month spent debugging and operating the platform — keeping it running, not building features. Not included in dollar totals.
Priced services are included in the headline total. Items without a public price still need a quote.
How each total is calculated
Credits and included usage are applied before the total. Published list rates; taxes are excluded.
- us-east-1 list prices for a production setup with Route 53, CloudFront, WAF, ALB, Fargate, multi-AZ NAT, CloudWatch, and Single-AZ RDS.
- Running this yourself takes about 81 hours each month to debug and operate. Forte takes about 8.
Rates as of July 2026, from Forte's and AWS's published prices. Build charges are excluded on both sides. Actual usage changes your bill. Treat this as an estimate, not a quote.
Want a quote instead? Share your bill.
One product usually needs several services
AWS covers part of the product. Other services provide the rest. Each one adds an account, a bill, and another system to maintain.
Multiple services
With AWS
Hosting, networking & databaseAWS
User authenticationClerk Pro
Subscriptions & paymentsBuild it yourself on Stripe
Request-level debuggingSentry Team
Integration code, credentials, dashboards, and failure handling stay with your team.
Forte puts these parts in one platform
With Forte
- Hosting, networking & databaseIncluded
- User authenticationIncluded
- Subscriptions & paymentsBuilt in, Stripe-backed
- Request-level debuggingIncluded
One operational view for deployments, users, payments, databases, and request-level debugging.
Migrate from AWS in 15 minutes
No special tooling. No migration scripts. Just point Forte at your existing repository.
Connect your GitHub repo
Point Forte at the repository you already build from. It builds the same container image your Dockerfile describes.
Move your environment variables
Copy what's in Parameter Store or Secrets Manager into Forte. Same keys, same values.
Push your code
Push to your branch, or publish a GitHub release. Forte builds, pushes to a registry, and deploys. You do not maintain a buildspec or pipeline.
Turn on sign-in and payments
Flip on built-in user authentication and Stripe-backed payments instead of standing up Cognito and a billing service.
Point your domain
Update Route 53 to Forte's endpoint. TLS is automatic. You do not manage certificates or listener rules.