Hello, Database Labs founder here. Thanks for the feedback. I will be revising the features list shortly to (hopefully) make the unique value proposition clear

Hello, Database Labs founder here. Thanks for the feedback. I will be revising the features list shortly to (hopefully) make the unique value proposition clearer based on this and other feedback from this thread. I wrote of some key advantages over RDS at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8483711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8483711 , which I'll soon be incorporating into the website. Heroku suffers from all of the same technical shortcomings listed there since it is also hosted on Amazon EC2 and also runs on EBS network drives. Beyond that, while I like Heroku's simplicity and tooling, Heroku is frankly insanely expensive for what you get at all but the lowest pricing tiers. They use this as part of a vendor lock-in based user retention strategy. That is, they make it rather painful to ever get your data out of their system once it's on. At the free / low tiers, it seems like a great deal. Then, when your app actually takes off, they ramp up the price very quickly, betting that most people will just pay (because it means their app is becoming successful) rather than bother with jumping through the hoops they set up to get your data out of their system. We believe that the superior long-term business strategy is to build customer trust and develop a reputation for superior customer treatment: your data is yours, and you can take it anywhere you like. We aren't going to try to lock you in, we won't threaten to incur downtime for your app if you leave, and we believe our prices are much fairer. As for running your own Postgres instance, the non-trivial burden of conducting and testing reliable offsite backups, upgrading Postgres, patching the operating system for security holes and monitoring it for intrusions, and doing other general sysadmin work is then entirely on you. Some people want that level of control, which is fine, but it's not free. Our feedback so far indicates that a significant number of Postgres users would much rather pay for that and focus their time and energy on their core app.