[_jal]

We are heavy on-prem Postgres users. We currently run all major versions from 10-13, and are upgrading some clusters to 14 very soon. Old versions are mostly to support internal tools that we're not upgrading for various reasons, and will go away when the apps that use them do.

We generally stay one major version behind on the main production clusters. The major reason is usually just scheduling - PG upgrades are large projects that touch a lot of things, take a lot of prep and impact every part of our business, so scheduling it is always a fraught negotiation.

If you don't have a lot of complexity, I recommend finding a cadence that doesn't hurt, but sticking with it. Once you get far enough behind, it becomes harder to upgrade, mostly because you also weren't upgrading surrounding tooling, so you end up changing a lot of things at once.

As your environment grows in complexity and use, at some point I think you'll find that nontechnical concerns start to dominate these decisions.