If expending 6k per year on your database alone sounds reasonable to you, we have very different perspectives on a good use of investor funds.
We’re not talking about maintaining your own k8s cluster here mind you, but a basic Postgres setup. If you can’t handle that comfortably in an afternoon, you probably shouldn’t be entrusted with customer data.
> We’re not talking about maintaining your own k8s cluster here mind you, but a basic Postgres setup. If you can’t handle that comfortably in an afternoon, you probably shouldn’t be entrusted with customer data.
Intelligence is being able to set up your own postgres database with backups, PITR, retention policies, HA/replicas, and everything else needed to prevent catastrophic data loss. Wisdom is realizing that's a solved problem completely unrelated to your business, so you don't have to.
Well yeah, you can apply that to most problems you encounter as a company - there are service providers for pretty much anything you can imagine. That doesn't mean it's smart to spend a huge chunk of your revenue on OpEx, however.
Sure, and you need to do the build vs buy math, but why not take the "If you can’t handle that comfortably in an afternoon, you probably shouldn’t be entrusted with customer data." logic further and say
1. Don't use a third-party auth provider, if you can't build out an OAuth provider in an afternoon you shouldn't be entrusted with login credentials
2. Don't use Github, if you can't build out an internal Gitlab instance in an afternoon you shouldn't be entrusted with securing source code
3. Don't use Github Actions or CircleCI, if you can't self-host a Jenkins server in an afternoon you shouldn't be entrusted with secure deployments
4. Don't use a lawyer or outsourced HR, if you can't draft legally binding employment agreement in an afternoon you shouldn't be entrusted with hiring people
That's a straw man, obviously: I didn't talk about building your own database, but setting up PostgreSQL and pgBackRest, two well-defined, and thoroughly documented applications. With coding agents available, you don't need to much arcane domain knowledge for the fringe details, so a lot of the old reasons for appliances as a service don't hold anymore.
Other than that, yes! Setting up a Keycloak instance as opposed to handing over login credentials to Octa should be a consideration. Keeping your source code in GitLab over tying your entire development workflow to Microsoft vibe coders with an awful track record is a sensible stance.
> Don't use a lawyer or outsourced HR, if you can't draft legally binding employment agreement in an afternoon you shouldn't be entrusted with hiring people
That's a little ridiculous; there's an overlap between someone setting up a database for a startup and someone programmatically using a database at a startup. The overlap between that person and someone with a legal background is infinitesimally smaller.
I think we live in very different realities, 6k a year is nothing, its a weeks worth of pay for 1 SWE. A 6k a year savings opportunity is not on any funded startups radar.
And RDS is doing a lot more for you than what you can set up in an afternoon w.r.t observability and features that are just a click away. I actually implemented some of those features when I worked there :)
We just might—not everyone works in SV. The 6k are a single database out of a vastly bigger pool of expenses, so unless you’re funded with six to seven digits from the start, it’s not nothing. At least in Europe, shelling out 300 grand on an SWE for an early stage company is delusional.
We’re not talking about maintaining your own k8s cluster here mind you, but a basic Postgres setup. If you can’t handle that comfortably in an afternoon, you probably shouldn’t be entrusted with customer data.