How I Solved DynamoDB + Amplify Search Problem with OpenSearch for $27/Month Instead of Migrating to Aurora

TL;DR : One OpenSearch instance. $27/month. DynamoDB search and multi-tenancy — solved. We Were About to Migrate to Aurora I had the Aurora estimate ready. I was planning to rewrite our Amplify Data models into SQL schemas. We had two problems. The first was search — once filter conditions exceeded 5 fields, DynamoDB's Query/Scan couldn't keep up. Full-text search was simply impossible. The second was multi-tenancy — we needed to safely isolate data across multiple products and multiple environments (staging / prod / sandbox). With Amplify Gen2's sandbox spinning up per-developer environments, naively adding a search engine would multiply instances and blow up costs. In the end, we didn't migrate to Aurora . We added OpenSearch as a "search layer" alongside DynamoDB, and used index naming conventions to consolidate multiple products and environments into a single instance. The additional cost: $27/month . Both search and multi-tenancy, solved. This article shares how we implemented thi