Not OP, but a big Aurora fan. Not that bad actually, but it varies by use case. Reasons aurora can be cheaper than you think: 1) Autoscaling. Adding a new re

Not OP, but a big Aurora fan. Not that bad actually, but it varies by use case. Reasons aurora can be cheaper than you think: 1) Autoscaling. Adding a new reader takes 15 minutes. Instead of provisioning for peak traffic and paying for it 24/7, run an extra reader for a few hours each day. 2) Metered IO. Aurora IO can handle 400k+ iops when needed. Or it can hum along at 100 iops. You pay only for what you use, you don't have to provision for peak load 24/7. Switching to Aurora saved us money over vanilla RDS. Self hosting postgres may be cheaper, but not by as much as would first appear.