Ready to transform your side hustle into your career? Or does your small business need a better platform to grow and thrive? You might think you need to be a tech genius or computer programmer to make these things happen. But the good news is, you can start or expand your business with the right kind of assistance, powered by AI, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

To help you begin, AWS Startup Advisor, Amazon's new AI-powered assistant that's purpose-built for startup founders, delivers personalized, expert-level guidance based on your stack and stage, right where you're already building.

"In the AI era, you don't have to be a cloud expert," said Deap Ubhi, director and global head of Technology for Startups at AWS. "You just need a trusted advisor that knows what you're building, that can help you plan your next steps."

Why startups choose AWS

The majority of top 100 startups globally use AI services on AWS. Here's why: AWS offers over 200 services across compute, AI, databases and security, all designed to work together. The AWS infrastructure is built for always-on availability, distributed across the globe, that grows with you.

You'll also have a quicker path to revenue with AWS Marketplace, where you can showcase products and services where enterprises are already buying. Last year alone, startups on AWS Marketplace more than doubled their sales year-over-year.

The AWS difference

With AWS Startup Advisor, you're not asking questions and getting generic answers that don't match your needs. Instead, you'll have an AI-powered builder assistant that's informed by expertise based on thousands of AWS Solutions Architects, and patterns drawn from billions of interactions across over 350,000 startups running on AWS.

It's also quick. AWS Startup Advisor can be downloaded the moment you sign up for an AWS account. The advisor learns about the specific stack and stage of your company, so that every recommendation is tailored to what you're actually building.

AWS Startup Advisor helps founders at every stage, including nontechnical founders using AI to build for the first time. And if you're part of their credits program, AWS Activate, Advisor can also help monitor your balance and help you make the most of your credits.

Startup Advisor helps you by:

• Alerting you about spending so you don't burn through your runway.
• Suggesting the right AWS service at the right time so you're not over-engineering or under-building.
• Delivering prompts and next actions tailored to your build, stack and stage.

Startup Advisor's recommendations evolve with your business as your architecture, costs and security needs change.

"Recommendations at the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) level will be different from the stage when you're selling to enterprises," said Ubhi. "Having Startup Advisor is like having a senior engineer or solutions architect on call."

Regardless of your technical background, AWS Startup Advisor is available wherever you're already building: on startups.aws, as an IDE extension for Kiro, VS Code and Cursor, and as a plugin for Claude Code. Same skills, same context, every entry point.

Startup Advisor:

• Gets your AWS environment right from Day 1: Focus on what you want to build and let Advisor handle the AWS setup — Identity and Access Management (IAM), billing and security baselines — so you're building on a solid foundation.
• Scaffolds your infrastructure: Tell Advisor what you're building or let it read your project. You'll get AWS-vetted infrastructure recommendations you can act on right in your editor.
• Cuts costs: Set up specific savings actions so you're not spending where you don't need to.
• Hardens security for your stage: Get a security baseline matched to where you are.
• Surfaces proactive alerts: Analyzes your IAM, budgets, Amazon Bedrock usage and CloudWatch.

Even better, there's no cost to use AWS Startup Advisor. Generating recommendations, invoking skills and getting guidance are all included as part of the experience. You only pay standard AWS pricing if you deploy the recommended resources.

AI-powered capability helps you migrate your platform

Already building somewhere else, but want to migrate your platform? AWS makes it easy. While migration might seem daunting, AWS built its AI-powered migration capability to make the move as fast as the decision.

You can choose the path that makes more sense to your startup:

1. AI-guided: Run the migration with AI-guidance on startups.aws. Let the agent handle provisioning, data migration, configuration updates and testing. You confirm key decisions at each step.

2. Work with an AWS expert: Share your plan and get guidance on architecture decisions, edge cases and execution.

3. Connect with a certified AWS Partner: They handle execution end to end.

And there's no cost to generate plans — you only pay for AWS resources you provision during actual migration. You may also qualify for AWS credits to help offset migration costs.

The AI-powered migration capability supports GCP infrastructure migrations — Kubernetes to EKS/ECS/Fargate, PostgreSQL/MySQL to RDS/Aurora, Google Cloud Storage to S3 — and AI/LLM inference migrations from Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI to Amazon Bedrock.

Head to startups.aws/migrate/wizard to generate your first migration plan today.

No matter the current stage of your business or where it's headed, AWS has got your back.

Visit startups.aws to learn more and to try AWS Startup Advisor.