Expensive how? It should be baked into your contract cost per client... maybe more expensive than you can run at scale. As to 5 dedicated employees for db sys

Expensive how? It should be baked into your contract cost per client... maybe more expensive than you can run at scale. As to 5 dedicated employees for db systems management... that's just roughly where I would put the breakpoint... short of that you're more likely to have people in mixed roles during development, where people spend only part of their time managing migrations for schema changes and most of their time will be developing features. The schema, table, index design etc. are largely done by the developers themselves at a startup level.... and even then, it's a problem where the costs can be op-ex against direct revenue scaling. So having 1000 clients isn't relatively more or less expensive than the first 5-10, it's baked into the model.