[frollogaston]

Cheapest Amazon RDS Postgres is like $15/mo if that's cheap enough. If you're doing lots of projects and don't want to pay that for each one, you can CREATE DATABASE for each with separate ACLs.

You mentioned not wanting to spend admin hours fine-tuning a self-hosted instance though. Are you really hitting the DB hard enough for that to matter, but SQLite works fine? Cause I haven't tuned local Postgres in years.

[hmokiguess]

Fair pushback, I think a lot of it is just stigma from not working close to the db layer and relying on these abstractions

I think most of the work I've done just fits in the other storage models and they scale really far really fast at $0 cost

I haven't paid for then ever, similarly, I have a few super tiny apps on Supabase and Neon too that cost me $0

On another project that got traction though, Postgres became better DX than DynamoDB and such, but that traction came with the overhead cost

The "fine-tuning" was setting up things like pgbouncer, restart, vaccuum, query optimizer, etc. Like, the db would always create some amount of work every fortnight. Coming from managed services, especially these serverless ones, they just work and you do nothing so it makes you spoiled.

Different mental model maybe?

On the "hitting the DB hard enough for that to matter but SQLite works fine" -- Absolutely! I have a <10gb SQLite inside a Lambda for some complex queries, and that gets refreshed whenever that data changes (which is not that often).

[frollogaston]

Well it might be relational vs non-relational. And I get that SQLite is relational, but you might not be using it in a relational way.