Not sure how async gem would fit into this. The backbone of Stepped Actions is ActiveJob which handles execution. Where do you think this would fit in?
Yes, state is persisted to DB upon every change. Action exceptions are handled gracefully and natural part of the system, they simply fail the action. Crash recovery is build-in thanks to checksums and ActiveJob, if you're using the right adapter, like GoodJob or SolidQueue where crash recovery is guaranteed.
> What's the secret sauce of undercutting AWS prices?
I'm only utilizing EC2 instances, storage and S3. Everything like databases, load balancers, NAT, even image storage is my own architecture and I'm not utilizing the value added services AWS offers for this and most would default to.
> How do you plan on keeping customers as they scale and mature?
I'll be adding features like DB replication and failover and multi AZ deployments down the line. But you're right, I'm focusing on small to medium size customers that want to run cheap, but still have all the convenience of a platform like Heroku for example.