I have 256MiB of FastRAM in my A1200, 8MiB of VRAM and of course 2MiB of ChipRAM. Whereas Amiga applications may have a small footprint, productivity applications will always require as much memory as the size of the data being worked on. It's possible to put a big dent in even 256MiB if you are editing large images for instance.
If your requirements are more modest, you can get away with less.