Architecture
How Thane works
A 4-stage lifecycle designed around how startups actually grow. Start simple, scale naturally, graduate when you're ready. No migration at any stage.
Hosted
Your workload runs in Thane's AWS Organization. We're the payer and governor. You get Heroku-like simplicity on real AWS infrastructure.
Who pays
Thane pays AWS
Your experience
Flat-rate pricing, push to deploy, zero AWS management
Credit Conversion
When you receive AWS Activate credits, your account moves to your own AWS Organization. No migration required — same VPC, same ECS, same app.
Who pays
Customer pays AWS (with credits)
Your experience
Credits now apply, no downtime, no infrastructure changes
Managed
You pay AWS directly. Thane charges a platform management fee for ongoing operations, governance, and automation.
Who pays
Customer pays AWS + Thane management fee
Your experience
Full AWS bill visibility, Thane handles operations
Graduation
Remove Thane's IAM roles and take full control. Your AWS account, your infrastructure, your rules. No migration needed.
Who pays
Customer pays AWS only
Your experience
Full ownership, no lock-in, optional consulting retainer
Deep Dive
Why this architecture?
AWS Organizations couples governance (SCPs) and billing (payer account). Credits only apply to the payer. You can't have Thane paying + customer credits applying + Thane governing simultaneously.
The org-to-org transfer solves this. Your workload account is fully self-contained — all runtime resources (VPC, ECS, ECR, databases, secrets) live inside it. When the account moves to your organization, nothing changes except who pays the bill and who sets the SCPs.
This is the key insight: by making every workload account self-contained from day one, we enable clean transfers without migration. Your app doesn't know or care which AWS Organization it belongs to. Same VPC, same ECS cluster, same database, same IP addresses.
The result is a platform with no lock-in — not as a marketing claim, but as an architectural guarantee. Your account is yours, at every stage.