The thing is, there is nothing else like Spanner, unless you want to trust a startup with your database, which opens up Cockroach, Yuga, and TiDB. Databases lik

The thing is, there is nothing else like Spanner, unless you want to trust a startup with your database, which opens up Cockroach, Yuga, and TiDB. Databases like RDS don't compare because they don't offer the same guarantees. Nothing even in AWS' and Azure's portfolios is like Spanner. Back of napkin math I did a couple of months ago: Spanner costs about $1/month for 2 writes/second and 10 reads/second. The minimum is $88 which is 176wps and 880rps. If your startup gets more traffic than that, you have good problems. The simplified guarantee model (fully linearizable and serializable everything; automagic sharding, replication and failover) could save you costs elsewhere. Low-value high-volume data like logs and search queries can be sent to a cheaper self-hosted timeseries/fts database.