If you're choosing to pay large sums of money for SQL Server instead of the open source alternatives, you should also factor in the large sums of money to have

If you're choosing to pay large sums of money for SQL Server instead of the open source alternatives, you should also factor in the large sums of money to have good development/staging environments too. All the more reason to just use Postgres or MySQL. EDIT: as someone else hinted at, it does look like the free Developer version of SQL Server is fully featured and licensed for use in any non-prod environment, which seems reasonable.