The economics of a Postgres free tier

I would love a service, where I can pay 2$ per month, pre-paid, something like my email, and then get a worry free Postgres instance - some limits as what these free databases offer, just for 1-2$ a month so that I know that I pay my part and that the database is kept alive.

But all DBaaS's seem to offer free or at least 20$ per month, which is excessive for a small hobby project.

Does that exist?

Something I'd love to understand is the latency model for hosted databases like this. Every production web app or backend I've worked on has pretty much depended on having 1-3ms latency to the database. That's easy when you're deploying your own hardware, and in my experience easy when you use a cloud provider's hosted offering in the same zone, and fine within the region.

So how does this work? I sign up and get a Postgres connection string. Where is it? Because the where _really_ matters. Do Xata and the other examples of this all deploy into all the cloud providers and all the regions and let you choose which one? That feels like a big duplication of effort and like it would be harder to get critical mass in order to get the unit economics to work. Or do people just put up with a database 10ms away?

Responding with my Neon employee hat on:

> Neon is scaling databases to zero and offer a certain number of "active hours" in their free tier.

Neon's free tier allows users to run their database 24/7[0]. That means you could keep a database alive all the time if you wanted. Quoting the pricing page:

> 24/7 for your main database

In addition to the 24/7 usage on the free tier, Neon additionally gives you 20 compute hours for branches other than your primary/main branch.

Just wanted to clear up the confusion in the article. Not sure why they phrased the Neon section that way.

Edit: The author has corrected the statement about Neon. Thanks!

[0]: https://neon.tech/pricing

This seems great.

I was looking for a free cloud database I could use to host some shared data for my small free open source project and this should do nicely.

I probably wont ever even use more than a dozen MB or so and such low traffic.

Basically it's an app for remote controlling home theater equipment, and I wanted to give users of the app a centralized database to add the little text commands that they find and use for their various device control. So that new users can get a list of commands that other users have written/found for specific devices instead of having to go to the command doc themselves every time.

And I doubt ill ever have more than maybe a couple hundred users tops.

Last I checked: Supabase deactivates after 1 week, Render deletes after 90+14 days.

At bit.io, _if_ you ran the database on the free tier for the full month, it cost us around $0.83. We scaled to zero, so the most common case was that free tier DBs cost us about 1/30th of that. That database was running on its own pod, isolated from every other database.

I've been wondering this for a while -- why are people using DBaaS?

Wouldn't you use an AMI of choice, self-host, or use one of the cloud native solutions? Seems like piping all your DB calls outside your VPC would have a lot of downsides, not the least of which is a lot of latency (I get there is peering infrastructure). Also, there are security issues to contend with, threat surface is much larger with a DB available to the internet vs a DB on a segmented private network only available to the middle tier.

Is it a cost thing? Is something like xata or neon cheaper than say AWS Aurora? I don't see how it could be cheaper with all the inherent egress costs.

Looking at the pricing for those AWS instance types ("db.t4g.medium" and "r6gd.large.search"), then looking at co-location costs... I wonder if they have enough clusters that it would make sense to move some to co-location?

I guess if their customers are mostly already using AWS, that would be a bad idea because of AWS data transfer fees then applying?

from their homepage

> Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL.

ummm. what about https://neon.tech/?