Low cost, High Value — Its called AWS S3

I attended a couple of AWS events in late 2025, early 2026 and learned about AWS Kiro. There was an opportunity to participate in Hacknight organized by Elastic and AWS, I did pretty well in that Hackathon using Kiro. My confidence in building solutions grew up. I always thought about builing a solution that makes some impact to someone.

My son goes to a pre-nursery school in Bangalore, I have a very good relationship with school founders. During one of the interactions with school founders, I just asked if they need any software web app for the school. The answer was “yes” from the founders. I then started thinking about what kind of application a school might need.

I wanted to build a working solution that would enhance school’s brand image. All the thoughts, ideas came while walking in the morning, solo coffee on the sofa, waiting at the traffic signals, parking my bike in basement and during long waits for elevators. My thought process grew and I found that AWS S3 is something that I could explore for low cost and high value.

I started vibe coding with kiro, “the outstanding tool”. I started building school gallery app with front end tech stack like html, css and javascript which can show school activity photos and videos. Parents can view, download and share kids activities with friends and family.

But just this feature does not make much difference to the school. I then thought I should improve it further and build a school app for the future.

The idea now is to build an admin application and give the school staff the flexibility to add features or categories, functionalities, announcements, school holiday calendar, about the school, how we teach, about founders, feedback/suggestions/complaints form, school social media links, location and contacts. Audit logs to monitor and track what is being done in the admin panel along with a feature to see the app views. A notification bell to see if any new feedback is recieved so that school admins can act on it quickly.

All in an admin app, as and when they push any of these features, it will reflect on the end user’s school gallery app. I used S3 for admin app, write the configs and content to S3 bucket and end user app would read from S3 through the static page. AWS lambda and preSigned url helped for photos and videos downloads.

I had another thought that would parents really enter the website address and browse through it. I interacted with Kiro and it suggested Progressive Web App(PWA). It works like a mobile app on both android and iPhone as an installer. This is the value addition for the school app users, as the PWA just looks and works like a mobile app. I did not want the school to invest more money on the software application since its not worth it.

The school announced the app launch to parents on the occasion of the Ganesha festival and the response from parents was just mind blowing. AWS S3 billing is just as low as the cost of Biryani for a month.

EC2, Containers, gateways, backend, database and other stacks would have costed the school more. Static page on the S3 with these many functionalities is really a value addition and worth for a preschool app users.

No sensitive information captured. School does not need to depend on me for any requirements related to CRUD operations. Admin panel is built with full flexibility to manage CRUD operations.

School founders were stunned to see the app and the cost. Value added is more and the cost is less.

As my son studies in the preschool, as a gesture of respect to the founders and the school, I chose not to ask them for any payment to build the solution. Thanks to Kiro and S3.