[roberttod]

Do these providers really bring enough value to use them over a colocated managed db? (Not just the same region, but subnet etc)

I was under the impression for quite some time that it wasn't that bad to have 2-3ms latencies compared to a co-located DB which is typically <1ms. However, we recently switched from Neon to a colocated, managed db and there was a huge improvement. Some of our queries were executing sequentially (due to our ORM, Prisma), and so what was a 3 second transaction was reduced to only 1 second. Yes this could be rearchitected better, but it illustrates a major floor in my mind for these companies providing only a DB.

Managed vs. unmanaged is a massive difference and would be worth it. But these days I was under the impression most hosting companies also offer managed DBs.

[flowerlad]

Not everyone needs that kind of performance. Consider for example someone upgrading from an Excel spreadsheet. The fact that you can create a Neon database in just a few minutes, typing only 2 strings, is pretty incredible. And they don’t even ask for a credit card!

[TheAnkurTyagi]

fun fact - this blog is also powered by neon

Here’s a quick rundown of the tech stack:

Framework: nextjs Styling: tailwindcss Database: prisma paired with neondatabase MDX Support: I love writing with Markdown Auth: ClerkDev—an absolute game-changer. Animations & Icons: Framer Motion and Heroicons. UI Components: Radix UI

github - https://github.com/tyaga001/devtoolsacademy

[jitl]

I havent used either beyond hobby scale, but I’ve followed both for a while because my day job runs a very large Postgres deployment.

You can run both Neon and Supabase in your cloud account by self hosting. They may also offer on-prem managed deployment, I haven’t looked. I think anyone at large scale interested in using them will “colocate” them.

They have different capabilities over the incumbent cloud provider managed Postgres service.

Neon is very interesting for:

- scale up & scale out. Get more cores for your DB than the max incumbent single instance size.

- fast SSD cache in front of S3. Incumbent DB often uses glacially slow network block storage like EBS.

- branching and schema management wizardry

Supabase is “just” a vanilla Postgres instance plus a suite of extra services and tooling. In their case the collocated version can add the services around an incumbent cloud managed DB.

[panarky]

Sounds like your issue lies with your ORM, not with query latency.

[re-thc]

> Yes this could be rearchitected better, but it illustrates a major floor in my mind for these companies providing only a DB.

The solution is AWS PrivateLink (or equivalent with other clouds). It allows you to connect internally from VPC to VPC. It's solved.

It's definitely offered by some managed DB vendors. So this is more of a case of a startup providing this soon rather than this being an issue.

[nikita]

Price/performance will be a wash at least for steady workloads.

But usability will be massively better. Both platforms offer various things to make developer more efficient and dev cycle shorter