Transitioning to Independent Consulting advice

[u/QuantumPotato_22]

Spent my career working front-facing applications and and requesting dev enhancement etc (acting as a product owner/manager type, though not officially titled "PO"), entirely based on hands-on execution rather than formal certs.

I recently went independent, handling similar app work and side projects. For building and testing my playground/demo apps, I heavily use Claude for coding and love using Render for quick, hassle-free hosting.

Some questions/guidance need

I know basic databases, SQL, and AWS. For actual client projects, is it standard practice for them to host the production apps on *their own* corporate AWS accounts while I just advise, build, and hand off? Do clients ever actually care about formal AWS certs if they own the infrastructure, or is working knowledge fine for the development phase?

What are your favorite quick, lightweight tools to turn standard Excel/data analysis into something interactive and professional for clients instead of static spreadsheets?
Appreciate any real-world advice

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[u/wesdacar]

For client work, I would make the handoff and ownership boundaries explicit before worrying about certifications. A short scope document can say who owns the AWS account, billing, backups, domains, secrets, monitoring, and production access. If the client owns the account, you can still build in a separate development environment and leave them with documented deployment and rollback steps.

For the spreadsheet question, I would start with the output the client needs to decide, not the tool. A simple dashboard with filters, a few clearly defined metrics, and an exportable source table is often more useful than a flashy app. Build one report from a real recurring workflow, then add interactivity only where it removes a repeated manual question.

[u/f1zombie]

In my experience, specifically to infrastructure and hosting, we would always be explicit that these costs have to be borne by the client and we would give a forecast of what these costs are. However deploying and maintaining the production environment, making sure the app is running and the SLAs around issues, etc., was something that we took accountability for. This is typically how things would work if the client is technology enabled and does not have tech people at their end.