[HN Gopher] The economics of a Postgres free tier
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The economics of a Postgres free tier
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-07-11 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xata.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (xata.io)
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| from their homepage
|
| > Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL.
|
| ummm. what about https://neon.tech/?
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Wow, I usually hate marketing pages but that one is awesome
| snide wrote:
| Xata employee here. The clarification would be "platform" vs.
| "host". You get a lot with Xata beyond the core Postgres
| offering. We automatically replicate to OpenSearch for a great,
| fast search experience, provide file attachments through the DB
| itself (with image transformations), provide a pretty cool
| editor, and are now starting to think heavily towards how
| migrations could be better (more on this next week). No knock
| against Neon, who build cool stuff too.
|
| I agree "only" is likely a little aggressive, but marketing is
| tricky and sometimes the A/B gods appear. We've switched this
| one-liner a few times in the past year. I'll provide that
| feedback to the team in any case.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Where does that $2 a month price come from?
|
| You could choose a webhost with a database included.
| krageon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 ala 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/
| mrkurt wrote:
| 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.
| tristan957 wrote:
| 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
| mrkurt wrote:
| 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?
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| just get a vm on something like Vultr and install postgres on
| it
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: EUR4.50 per month.
|
| Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST
|
| Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing.
|
| Automate snapshots for backups: EUR0.0131/GB per month.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Supabase is free but only slept after 1 week of inactivity.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| password4321 wrote:
| Last I checked: Supabase deactivates after 1 week, Render deletes
| after 90+14 days.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Responding with my Neon employee hat on:
|
| > Neon is scaling databases to zero and offer a certain number of
| "active hours" in their free tier.
|
| Neon's free tier allows users to run their database 24/7[0]. That
| means you could keep a database alive all the time if you wanted.
| Quoting the pricing page:
|
| > 24/7 for your main database
|
| In addition to the 24/7 usage on the free tier, Neon additionally
| gives you 20 compute hours for branches other than your
| primary/main branch.
|
| Just wanted to clear up the confusion in the article. Not sure
| why they phrased the Neon section that way.
|
| Edit: The author has corrected the statement about Neon. Thanks!
|
| [0]: https://neon.tech/pricing
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Yeah, but there is a point (about 1 hour, last I checked being
| a few months ago) where you start getting cold starts in Neon.
| You can call that being active the whole time but CockroachDB
| doesn't have this problem. If I had to rank it:
|
| "Live" database > CockroachDB (few hundred ms) > NeonDB (2-3
| seconds) > traditional cold start. This is just my impression
| and the data is made up but that is how it has felt as a user.
| So there are definitely levels of "scaling to zero"
| tristan957 wrote:
| When you scale something to 0, indeed there are issues with
| cold starts. On the Neon free tier, you will get a cold start
| if your database is inactive for 5 minutes (you can configure
| this value on paid plans).
|
| As an exercise, I decided to try for myself what my cold
| start time is + query round trip, on Neon's free tier. Note
| that I am in Austin connecting to us-east-2.
| $ time psql -c 'SELECT 1'
| 'postgresql://neondb_owner:<password>@<endpoint>.us-
| east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require' Null
| display is "(null)". ?column? ----------
| 1 (1 row) real 0m1.156s
| user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.020s
|
| You can't make a trend out of 1 data point, but thought I
| would provide it nonetheless.
| tudorg wrote:
| [Author here] I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood or
| remembered old information (was it always like that?). I have
| fixed the phrase in the blog post.
| tristan957 wrote:
| The understanding of the Neon free tier and the term, compute
| hours, has been something we are always trying to clear up,
| so it would not surprise me if the phrasing changed at some
| point in time, but the free tier has always allowed a user to
| run a database continuously as far as I remember.
|
| I have had to correct others in our Discord server for
| instance too.
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