This is so true, I had the exact same experience last year (back then they says it was something like 700 USD per core yearly for the startup plan), decided to

This is so true, I had the exact same experience last year (back then they says it was something like 700 USD per core yearly for the startup plan), decided to table the offer and use their dump backups until I was bigger. Then they released Regional replicas as an enterprise feature and realized their core offering was complete and all the new cool stuff was going for their paid enterprise offering. Then they became proprietary and lost me completely. If I ever need distributed read replicas I can do it myself with Postgres or just use AWS RDS. My money is on Yugabyte now.