Were you looking at dedicated CPU or shared CPU? I made that mistake when i first looked and was shocked at how much more it was than DO, but after noticing that it seems like the same price.

Everybody charges a log for managed DB. The arcane nature of Postgres is a great cash bonanza for cloud providers.

Weird how this is your impression. Maybe people tend to over allocate their instances? I've been super careful to choose exactly what I need for my application. My GCP Cloud Postgres instance is the second smallest (1 vcpu, 1.7gb, 15gb).

I'm 24/7 doing 300 tran/s with ~20% cpu utilization and it only costs $27.34 a month. I just upgraded to Postgres 14 (from 13) with a click of a button and a few seconds of switchover downtime. Seems more than worth the price.

Getting 20% CPU utilization on 300 tran/s is crazy.

I can't tell if this is good or bad. =)

Most of my queries are super simple and most of the load is an update statement on a primary key column.

To be more explicit: 20% CPU utilization for that workload is shockingly high.

Interesting, doesn't seem high to me given that this is the backend to GCP functions which are a sustained ~25 rps, but maybe I'm missing an index or something. It is mostly update writes though, so maybe that is part of it.

#1 query is: `insert into on conflict do update` (based on id column).

57 writes/s

281 trans/s

~12-15 connections

547 megs used

Paying $300 per year for something that a raspberry pi + sqlite could handle is still very expensive imo.

Not sure if that is a troll response, but that is very much of an apple/orange comparison.

1. My application needs postgres as it uses a few specific queries that sqlite does not support the same way. Hello `interval`.

2. Backups are automatic and transparent.

3. Upgrades, instance sizing and disk expansion are just a few clicks away.

4. I don't have to deal with hosting, power, internet, security.

5. Charts, logs, metrics all built in.

6. On the same network as the rest of the frontend... gcp functions.

Just one of those alone is worth the $300/yr imho.

Not trolling, I genuinely think it's a lot of money for a simple database though. Maybe yours isn't, but I don't know any provider that charges less than 300 for a hosted db.

Btw Sqlite can go a long way:

https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/

https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-q...

no database is 'simple'. it really depends on the use case, doesn't it?

"going a long way" on sqlite would have really end up biting me in the ass as soon as my app needed to scale beyond it. now i've written a bunch of sqlite specific queries (ex: show me all the rows that were modified over 10 minutes ago) that i'd need to spend time migrating and testing on another database.

in my case, i had no idea what the actual load on my database was going to be. i knew i'd be sending it a constant stream of traffic and the traffic would grow over time, but until i did that, there was no (easy) way to load test it.

i started with the $7/mo option and when i grew out of that, a couple clicks later i was onto the $13/mo option. unloading the points i outlined above from my concerns allowed me to focus on building features instead of infrastructure.

it is all about perspective and approaching things in a way that is logical, not thinking in terms of the latest HN headlines. this app is the backend for something generating many millions of dollars a year in revenue. $300/mo is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Let's say you have a hobby or open source website that requires a database backend and isn't making money. $300 / year is quite expensive all of a sudden.

Indeed and that is why there are plenty of options for free tiers. I even started off with the $84/yr option, which isn't too bad.

I've lost the point of your message though. Your original response suggested a RPI... which is about $35 just for the base hardware and it doesn't do nearly what I outlined above.

Yeah, it seems weird that they're a lot more than digitalocean.