8 ms·

I would love a service, where I can pay 2$ per month, pre-paid, something like my email, and then get a worry free Postgres instance - some limits as what these

I would love a service, where I can pay 2$ per month, pre-paid, something like my email, and then get a worry free Postgres instance - some limits as what these free databases offer, just for 1-2$ a month so that I know that I pay my part and that the database is kept alive. But all DBaaS's seem to offer free or at least 20$ per month, which is excessive for a small hobby project. Does that exist?

noja 2y ago
Where does that $2 a month price come from? You could choose a webhost with a database included.
- krageon 2y ago
  A small db user costs almost nothing to the host. It'd be like a shared webhost, except there's none of the overhead of running the programming language (e.g. php). That is by far the most expensive part of the machine. Offering this for around that price is a proposition that will have significant RoI in terms of hardware used.
  - filleokus 2y ago
    I guess that's true now with these "serverless" databases where compute and storage is separated in a neat way. Otherwise you either need to be ok with keeping the whole ≈vm alive, or have a really old school shared database setup alá 2004 web hosting… Maybe it's no problem, but feels kinda icky? But regardless, I agree with you. I can spin up the cheapest fly.io machine for 2 usd / month, or some DO droplet/function, but neon and these guys are either free or 20. It always feels better paying a bit than nothing. I know CockroachDB has some serverless > 0 (but cheap) pricing https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
  - mrkurt 2y ago
    A small db isn't free to _operate_. The actual compute and storage costs are pretty low, but keeping the thing running is harder than you'd think. Keeping it running with no users is easy. Keeping it running when someone ships an app that blows the DB up is hard.
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      It seems like the post is about someone who offers it for free. I just want to pay the cost price for an equally scaled down offering.
      - bigiain 2y ago
        No no. The article makes it very clear it's costing them $1 - $2.50 per month to provide, but that they're treating that as marketing/acquisition costs. And "the cost price" for a free service isn't the cost price for exactly the same service as a subscription service. As others are pointing out, the risks to them of you assuming you're entitled to something more than their free offering users get - like having them respond to a support or billing query, or feeling entitled to doing term service availability - is problematic enough that it's not likely to be worthwhile. And at $2 per month, credit card processing eats a big chunk of each payment up front. And it requires setup of the recurring payments and account management, payment reminders and failed recurring billing notification, invoices and tax compliance crap. And to top all that off there's the fraud risk of people using stolen card numbers or using the service as a small transaction verifier for validating stolen card numbers. When a cardholder disputes a transaction you get hit with a chargeback fee, somewhere between ~$15 and as high as $100 depending on a bunch of stuff. If you don't have decent fraud detection and rate limiting, some asshole who's just bought 1000 credit card numbers off the dark web can make for a _very_ expensive day for you. And then there's all the internal accounting and reporting they'll need to do for this new class of paying user. I get what you want to do. But honestly? I can 100% see why most people would refuse to enter into a paid account type relationship with anyone for anything as low as $2/month. Hell, in the last few years Google hseem to have gone from their old price point of $5/month for paid Gmail accounts up to I think $12/month now.
        tossandthrow 2y ago
        > assuming you're entitled to something more than their free offering users get I explicitly wrote "[same] limits as what these free databases offer". So there is no additional entitlement by taking payment. > And at $2 per month, credit card processing eats a big chunk of each payment up front You are over-indexing on a specific way to take payment. It could be loading 50$ on your account that is being deducted 2$ a month - Like Fly does it. Re. fraud risk, accounting etc. I think your assessment is completely opposite to the reality. The following is from a Fly newsletter: > Charging a credit card prevents most at-scale abuse. Abusive users are surprisingly loathe to pay even $5, and it's really difficult to keep fraudulent credit cards working over time. And when we run charges, we get really interesting Stripe data about the trustworthiness of a charge that we can use to restrict the platform. Fly has the business model, xata.io apparently has the budget to self-finance this. Why not just combine it? Really to understand that this is in addition to other offering. Of cause you can not expect to get an enterprise-grade Postgres instance for 2$ a month. But what Xeta claims to offer for 2$ a month should absolutely be possible, and enough for a small database that runs rudimentary analytics for a small-scale blog, etc.
tristan957 2y ago
Heroku has a max $5/month plan if I am reading their plans[0] correctly. Not sure if that meets your definition of worry-free. [0]: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql
mrkurt 2y ago
You can run a Postgres on Fly.io full time for just slight more than $2. It's not a great business though. The compromise you're making is that we don't manage it. It'll probably stay running, it's likely to be worry free (especially if you barely use it), but if anything goes wrong it's up to you. You could also spin up a VM for cheap somewhere, install Postgres, and just let it be. Managed databases are expensive to run – worry free costs quite a bit of money to ensure. Maybe you don't need that for a hobby project?
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  On more than one occasion I have lost data on Fly. this is absolutely not a managed Postgres (and they don't claim to be)
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  I just now realize who you are! I can add, that I actually had this setup running on Fly for a small analytics backend for a low volume website. When I tried to login to the interface after some months I discovered that everything had been broken for at least some weeks - to a degree that I could not recover anything from the volume. Love the business model! Ability to just load 50$ on to my account and let is run. But I don't dare to use your services to anything but ephemeral dev envs.
  - mrkurt 2y ago
    Believe it or not, I know exactly when this happened and why. We had a big disk array failure and (a) our UI did not know how to recover and (b) disk snapshots timed out before many people knew their disks were gone. This is one of those instances where an unmanaged single node Postgres sucks to use.
web3-is-a-scam 2y ago
just get a vm on something like Vultr and install postgres on it
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month. Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing. Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Not entirely managed and worry free.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    I like you think some DBaaS vendor is reading this, thinking of how to offer an always-on fully managed, backed up, and replicated database for $2/mo. Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
    - bigiain 2y ago
      > Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2. I agree. But... Reading the OPs post in the most favourable light, it sounds like what he'd like would be the existing "free" service, but to have a wait to pay for it in an attempt to ensure it'll still be worthwhile for the company to keep it running long term. They say 'the cost for an "active but lightly used database" is somewhere between $1 and $2.5 per month.' so it's at least the right order of magnitude. But one single support call to an entitled "paying customer" blows away any benefit here, so you're probably right that it's a bad idea.
      - hipadev23 2y ago
        The thing is free are just customers you haven’t upsold yet. You can always boot them off your platform eventually, and they cant really complain, cause it’s free tier and it never lasts, and most everyone recognizes that. But accept $2? Now you’re knowingly taking money from a cheapass, and you owe them some level of service, support, and commitment as they’re paying you. Free customers are worth so much more than $2 customers.
reducesuffering 2y ago
Supabase is free but only slept after 1 week of inactivity.
renewiltord 2y ago
People who want to pay that little and can’t manage it themselves are very demanding. Better not to do business with them. I have a $2.50/mo racknerd machine. Just bare Linux. Just do something like that. If you don’t want to, chances are that no one wants to manage it for you either.
pietz 2y ago
The SQLite offerings are pretty good for hobby projects. The free tier ok turso goes a long way and the next level costs you $8
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Point is that I don't want something for free, I want to pay for it.
  - kljfds 2y ago
    Yeah, but you only want to pay $2/month. I don't know how you came up with that amount, but it seems too low a price point for anyone to spend the 100s of man-hours to wire it up, not to mention the time spent with customer service. And then there's the marketing, taxes, etc. You're better off just self-hosting postgres in docker on your own vps for $4-5/month.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      Well, the company behind the post offers it for free. They certainly should be able to offer it for 2$?
      - fragmede 2y ago
        No. By selling it for $2, they have to deal with the credit card/whatever fee, Wich is typically 2.9%+30 cents, so they're already down from your $2, and then they have to staff customer support to deal with any sort of problems that crop up. Which makes it not worth the < $2 they'd get from everyone in that category. 100 paying customers in that category is still only $200, which isn't even enough for groceries for a family for a month. and for how much hassle?
        tossandthrow 2y ago
bb1234 2y ago
Same here. I have the same issue with realtime services. They are either free (and, hence very limited), or over $50 per month. I wish the usage-pricing step function had smaller jumps.

noja 2y ago

Where does that $2 a month price come from? You could choose a webhost with a database included.

krageon 2y ago
A small db user costs almost nothing to the host. It'd be like a shared webhost, except there's none of the overhead of running the programming language (e.g. php). That is by far the most expensive part of the machine. Offering this for around that price is a proposition that will have significant RoI in terms of hardware used.
- filleokus 2y ago
  I guess that's true now with these "serverless" databases where compute and storage is separated in a neat way. Otherwise you either need to be ok with keeping the whole ≈vm alive, or have a really old school shared database setup alá 2004 web hosting… Maybe it's no problem, but feels kinda icky? But regardless, I agree with you. I can spin up the cheapest fly.io machine for 2 usd / month, or some DO droplet/function, but neon and these guys are either free or 20. It always feels better paying a bit than nothing. I know CockroachDB has some serverless > 0 (but cheap) pricing https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/
- mrkurt 2y ago
  A small db isn't free to _operate_. The actual compute and storage costs are pretty low, but keeping the thing running is harder than you'd think. Keeping it running with no users is easy. Keeping it running when someone ships an app that blows the DB up is hard.
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    It seems like the post is about someone who offers it for free. I just want to pay the cost price for an equally scaled down offering.
    - bigiain 2y ago
      No no. The article makes it very clear it's costing them $1 - $2.50 per month to provide, but that they're treating that as marketing/acquisition costs. And "the cost price" for a free service isn't the cost price for exactly the same service as a subscription service. As others are pointing out, the risks to them of you assuming you're entitled to something more than their free offering users get - like having them respond to a support or billing query, or feeling entitled to doing term service availability - is problematic enough that it's not likely to be worthwhile. And at $2 per month, credit card processing eats a big chunk of each payment up front. And it requires setup of the recurring payments and account management, payment reminders and failed recurring billing notification, invoices and tax compliance crap. And to top all that off there's the fraud risk of people using stolen card numbers or using the service as a small transaction verifier for validating stolen card numbers. When a cardholder disputes a transaction you get hit with a chargeback fee, somewhere between ~$15 and as high as $100 depending on a bunch of stuff. If you don't have decent fraud detection and rate limiting, some asshole who's just bought 1000 credit card numbers off the dark web can make for a _very_ expensive day for you. And then there's all the internal accounting and reporting they'll need to do for this new class of paying user. I get what you want to do. But honestly? I can 100% see why most people would refuse to enter into a paid account type relationship with anyone for anything as low as $2/month. Hell, in the last few years Google hseem to have gone from their old price point of $5/month for paid Gmail accounts up to I think $12/month now.
      - tossandthrow 2y ago
        > assuming you're entitled to something more than their free offering users get I explicitly wrote "[same] limits as what these free databases offer". So there is no additional entitlement by taking payment. > And at $2 per month, credit card processing eats a big chunk of each payment up front You are over-indexing on a specific way to take payment. It could be loading 50$ on your account that is being deducted 2$ a month - Like Fly does it. Re. fraud risk, accounting etc. I think your assessment is completely opposite to the reality. The following is from a Fly newsletter: > Charging a credit card prevents most at-scale abuse. Abusive users are surprisingly loathe to pay even $5, and it's really difficult to keep fraudulent credit cards working over time. And when we run charges, we get really interesting Stripe data about the trustworthiness of a charge that we can use to restrict the platform. Fly has the business model, xata.io apparently has the budget to self-finance this. Why not just combine it? Really to understand that this is in addition to other offering. Of cause you can not expect to get an enterprise-grade Postgres instance for 2$ a month. But what Xeta claims to offer for 2$ a month should absolutely be possible, and enough for a small database that runs rudimentary analytics for a small-scale blog, etc.

tristan957 2y ago

Heroku has a max $5/month plan if I am reading their plans[0] correctly. Not sure if that meets your definition of worry-free. [0]: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql

mrkurt 2y ago

You can run a Postgres on Fly.io full time for just slight more than $2. It's not a great business though. The compromise you're making is that we don't manage it. It'll probably stay running, it's likely to be worry free (especially if you barely use it), but if anything goes wrong it's up to you. You could also spin up a VM for cheap somewhere, install Postgres, and just let it be. Managed databases are expensive to run – worry free costs quite a bit of money to ensure. Maybe you don't need that for a hobby project?

tossandthrow 2y ago
On more than one occasion I have lost data on Fly. this is absolutely not a managed Postgres (and they don't claim to be)
tossandthrow 2y ago
I just now realize who you are! I can add, that I actually had this setup running on Fly for a small analytics backend for a low volume website. When I tried to login to the interface after some months I discovered that everything had been broken for at least some weeks - to a degree that I could not recover anything from the volume. Love the business model! Ability to just load 50$ on to my account and let is run. But I don't dare to use your services to anything but ephemeral dev envs.
- mrkurt 2y ago
  Believe it or not, I know exactly when this happened and why. We had a big disk array failure and (a) our UI did not know how to recover and (b) disk snapshots timed out before many people knew their disks were gone. This is one of those instances where an unmanaged single node Postgres sucks to use.

web3-is-a-scam 2y ago

just get a vm on something like Vultr and install postgres on it

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month. Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing. Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Not entirely managed and worry free.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  I like you think some DBaaS vendor is reading this, thinking of how to offer an always-on fully managed, backed up, and replicated database for $2/mo. Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    > Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2. I agree. But... Reading the OPs post in the most favourable light, it sounds like what he'd like would be the existing "free" service, but to have a wait to pay for it in an attempt to ensure it'll still be worthwhile for the company to keep it running long term. They say 'the cost for an "active but lightly used database" is somewhere between $1 and $2.5 per month.' so it's at least the right order of magnitude. But one single support call to an entitled "paying customer" blows away any benefit here, so you're probably right that it's a bad idea.
    - hipadev23 2y ago
      The thing is free are just customers you haven’t upsold yet. You can always boot them off your platform eventually, and they cant really complain, cause it’s free tier and it never lasts, and most everyone recognizes that. But accept $2? Now you’re knowingly taking money from a cheapass, and you owe them some level of service, support, and commitment as they’re paying you. Free customers are worth so much more than $2 customers.

reducesuffering 2y ago

Supabase is free but only slept after 1 week of inactivity.

renewiltord 2y ago

People who want to pay that little and can’t manage it themselves are very demanding. Better not to do business with them. I have a $2.50/mo racknerd machine. Just bare Linux. Just do something like that. If you don’t want to, chances are that no one wants to manage it for you either.

pietz 2y ago

The SQLite offerings are pretty good for hobby projects. The free tier ok turso goes a long way and the next level costs you $8

tossandthrow 2y ago
Point is that I don't want something for free, I want to pay for it.
- kljfds 2y ago
  Yeah, but you only want to pay $2/month. I don't know how you came up with that amount, but it seems too low a price point for anyone to spend the 100s of man-hours to wire it up, not to mention the time spent with customer service. And then there's the marketing, taxes, etc. You're better off just self-hosting postgres in docker on your own vps for $4-5/month.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    Well, the company behind the post offers it for free. They certainly should be able to offer it for 2$?
    - fragmede 2y ago
      No. By selling it for $2, they have to deal with the credit card/whatever fee, Wich is typically 2.9%+30 cents, so they're already down from your $2, and then they have to staff customer support to deal with any sort of problems that crop up. Which makes it not worth the < $2 they'd get from everyone in that category. 100 paying customers in that category is still only $200, which isn't even enough for groceries for a family for a month. and for how much hassle?
      - tossandthrow 2y ago

bb1234 2y ago

Same here. I have the same issue with realtime services. They are either free (and, hence very limited), or over $50 per month. I wish the usage-pricing step function had smaller jumps.