It's not just the setup. For smaller companies with tiny ops teams (or a developer that also serves as an ops guy), RDS can save a bunch of time in maintenance/

It's not just the setup. For smaller companies with tiny ops teams (or a developer that also serves as an ops guy), RDS can save a bunch of time in maintenance/security/upgrade land. You are going to get decent to good performance for most general cases, and you can easily create failovers and scale up/down without much of any Postgres knowledge. Especially when your product is in "get traction and survive" mode, it's nice to be able to worry more about your app and less about things like running a Postgres server or cluster. Yes, you'll wait a bit longer for new versions to come out, but that may or may not be a big deal. It isn't for us. We have the in-house knowledge to run our own cluster, but RDS does such a good job that we don't need to.