Yeah absolutely right, I'm just using the pipeline for my static files (i.e. styles, images, js) not for data pages. One more caveat I forgot to put in the post but should be mentioned is the collectstatic command. If you have a huge collection of static assets, collectstatic is painfully slow copying its files directly to the S3 bucket. In my case, I don't have a huge number of assets so it's not a big issue, but if anyone has any ideas for making collectstatic faster, I'd love to hear them