How I built a viral gaming SaaS with my 14yo son (and survived a massive traffic spike on AWS without going bankrupt)

It started on a random Saturday afternoon with a simple question from my 14-year-old son: "Dad, how much is my Brawl Stars account actually worth?" We searched online. Nothing but shady websites asking for passwords or outdated forums. So, as a Dev with 20 years of experience, I said: "Let's build it ourselves." 48 hours later, BrawlValue.com was born. What started as a simple API calculator accidentally turned into a massive, hyper-local gamified platform. The Gen-Z kids didn't just want to know their account value; they wanted to flex it. We introduced School and City Leaderboards. The result? The "Dark Social" (WhatsApp school groups) exploded. In just a few days, we mapped over 1,500 schools , acquired 5,000+ verified users via Discord OAuth2, and handled massive traffic spikes driven by top gaming influencers. Here is how I architected the system to survive the hype without paying thousands of dollars to Jeff Bezos. 1. The Nginx "Russian Roulette" Hack (Bypassing Rate Limits) The