Certainly. There are many paths to victory here.

One thing to consider is whether you _want_ your producers to be aware of the clients or not. If you use SQS, then your producer needs to be aware of where it's sending the message. In event-driven architecture, ideally producers don't care who's listening. They just broadcast a message: "Hey, this thing just happened." And anyone who wants to subscribe can subscribe. The analogy is a radio tower -- the radio broadcaster has no idea who's listening, but thousands and thousands of people can tune in and listen.

Contrast to making a phone call, where you have to know who it is that you're dialing and you can only talk to one person at a time.

There are pros and cons to both, but there's tremendous value in large applications for making the producer responsible for producing, but not having to worry about who is consuming. Particularly in organizations with large teams where coordinating that kind of thing can be a big pain.

But you're absolutely right: queues/topics are basically free, and you can have as many as you want! I've certainly done it the SQS way that you describe many times!

As I mentioned, there are many paths to victory. Mine works really well for me, and it sounds like yours works really well for you. That's fantastic :)