Hi, I working on my first Nextjs project after working for many years on React SPA apps. I was originally looking to host my app on Vercel but noticed they didn't have a good affordable option to connect to a database hosted on a private network (think AWS VPCs). I noticed that Netlify was the same. This took me down the path of using SST to deploy my app on AWS resources but this requires the use of and associated costs of a NAT gateway to connect to a RDS instance on a private subnet.

I would love to hear other people's experience in deploying Nextjs projects specifically around the database and the architecture used for deployment. I would be open to considering a publicly accessible database if the associated security concerns can be addressed. Note my project requires a relational database (I have used NoSQL database in many project in the past and this project doesn't fit). It would be helpful to understand your choice in terms of performance/latency, security and cost.

Thanks,
Mark.