No. You should not add coding/programming to your responsibilities if you can delegate that responsibility to other people or teams.

In terms of picking the CTOs, I always suffered when working with CTOs and project managers that are not technical. So business skills of a CTO is important but having good technical understand and up ti date perspective is equally important.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not expecting CTOs to review code as a responsibility but they should their past experience should allow them to dive deep while their management skills keep them afloat at a higher altitude to observe the progress. Only then they can see the big picture and also manage the expectations of the other C-levels.

A CTO that doesn’t understand the technical challenges is not capable to do such things.

What would have you done? Any advice?

Cloud platforms are surely way more expensive when your traffic is low. Especially when you’re hosting databases.

Assuming you’re using RDS Aurora and you went with a serverless architecture, I suspect the biggest cost is keeping the serverless Aurora instance warm. So it may not be a bad idea to outsource your DB to a service like Supabase and cut your cost to half almost instantly.

Supabase is also hosting the DBs on AWS, so as long as you match the regions, the latency should be OK.

Also feel free to let me know whether I was spot on or way off my assumptions. :)