AWS Amplify Reviews

Moving many sites to it cut hosting costs by 60 to 70 percent compared to Vercel, but brought poor UX, slow builds and time-consuming configuration.

Two years of building a tutoring platform ended in migrating to Supabase because DynamoDB lacked SQL joins and Cognito authentication was a pain.

Very opinionated, with CI/CD that does not allow Docker-in-Docker builds, so only the hosting part is used alongside CDK, which keeps switching easy.

Powerful for IoT apps and deep AWS integrations with Lambda, DynamoDB, and Cognito, though DataStore and initial setup are much trickier than Firebase.

Combining it for auth and GraphQL queries alongside CDK v2 works well in theory, though documentation gaps force heavy reliance on tutorials.

Multiple MVP and proof-of-concept apps built with Cognito auth ran without a single issue, and customizing styling or building your own React auth forms is straightforward.

Once past the initial learning curve, YAML-driven DynamoDB creation, GraphQL API code generation, and unified AWS billing make development much easier.

GraphQL schema management is unfriendly and connecting to Aurora SQL requires custom VTL resolvers with major feature gaps.

Used for the React frontend deploy with a Lambda backend and working well, with different accounts per environment and infrastructure kept in Terraform, and no issues.

Separating infrastructure and managing full Next.js support through CDK took far more effort than expected.