OP here. Roughly 50GB in db size. Fairly standard queries (full-text search + filters). Most queries are on the order of 10-100ms. Some more complex ones involving business logic exceeds 100ms.
This is well within my budget, but it sounds like there might be room for improvements?
In a more charitable interpretation, maybe the parent is talking about sub-100ms total round trip time for an API call over the public internet.