[nunez]

If I were a "tiny startup", I would absolutely leverage RDS in the first instance. Last thing I want to spend time doing is setting us Postgres and accumulating tech debt from a bad or suboptimal install. There are RDS instances that qualify for Free Tier as well if you're running _really_ lean.

In fact, the only time that I would consider migrating to a DB on EC2 is if the database isn't supported by RDS (DB2, for example, though I think there are solutions for this now), the licensing for RDS makes it cost-prohibitive or if the client needed to be able to really tweak the database engine or daemons.

[mdeeks]

The key words were "literally no money". By tiny startup I meant one or two people without any funding, revenue, and saddled with life expenses like rent, food, college savings, etc.

I definitely agree that a DB on EC2 is tech debt. But sometimes that is something you have to accept for immediate financial reasons while you figure out how to create a product with revenue to cover costs.