The economics of a Postgres free tier(xata.io)
xata.io
The economics of a Postgres free tier
https://xata.io/blog/postgres-free-tier
85 comments
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 $2.50/mo racknerd machine. Just bare Linux. Just do something like that. If you don’t want to, chances are that no one wants to manage it for you either.
Hetzner 2vCPU 4GB RAM 40gb: €4.50 per month.
Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST
Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing.
Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.
Three Docker Containers: Postgres, NGINX, PostgREST
Or Pocketbase if that's your sort of thing.
Automate snapshots for backups: €0.0131/GB per month.
Not entirely managed and worry free.
> Not entirely managed and worry free.
Which is where a lot of the extra cost comes from.
Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. Some of your costs of doing business won't scale down perfectly beyond a certain point so you won't make nearly as much from 1000 2$ customers as you will 100 $20 ones. The same for numerous technical matters. And that is before you think about SLAs and support - you might have realistic views on what to expect for $2 but having worked at the cheap end of web hosting I can assure you that a great many will not, especially at times when things don't go 100% right.
Which is where a lot of the extra cost comes from.
Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. Some of your costs of doing business won't scale down perfectly beyond a certain point so you won't make nearly as much from 1000 2$ customers as you will 100 $20 ones. The same for numerous technical matters. And that is before you think about SLAs and support - you might have realistic views on what to expect for $2 but having worked at the cheap end of web hosting I can assure you that a great many will not, especially at times when things don't go 100% right.
> Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task.
the hope is that some customers will grow and bring more revenue from more expensive plans and services.
the hope is that some customers will grow and bring more revenue from more expensive plans and services.
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.
Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Then don't offer support for bottom tier customers.
Some sort of service targeting hobby projects could possibly work if the support is a community forum.
Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.
Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.
It should be possible to pay for something while still having “best effort under shared resources” as the expected service level.
Compare local bus tickets vs taking a cab. The taxi costs 20x more, but in the best case scenario, they provide exactly the same value! If the bus is late, cold or overcrowded, I have no expectations to get refunded or even an apology. I just have to suck it up. This happens rarely enough that I still accept it and hand over my trust to them.
There is no illusion that my $2 bus ticket alone is enough to keep the bus running, in contrast with the cab.
(Bus companies having a tough time to profit is an orthagonal issue, taxi drivers struggle a lot too)
Compare local bus tickets vs taking a cab. The taxi costs 20x more, but in the best case scenario, they provide exactly the same value! If the bus is late, cold or overcrowded, I have no expectations to get refunded or even an apology. I just have to suck it up. This happens rarely enough that I still accept it and hand over my trust to them.
There is no illusion that my $2 bus ticket alone is enough to keep the bus running, in contrast with the cab.
(Bus companies having a tough time to profit is an orthagonal issue, taxi drivers struggle a lot too)
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What you want for $2/month is unreasonable. I pay more than double for FastMail.
As the article explains, it won't even cover the base hardware costs. So you won't be "paying your part". The only reason to offer something like this is to "up-sell" to an actual properly paid plan, and since you will also lose quite a large percentage to payment processor fees, have extra support/admin overhead, deal with users who now feel entitles to "paid support", having a $1 or $2/month price point is just not worth it.
You will either need pay for it, or do it yourself on a cheap Linode VPS or Hetzner machine or whatnot.
As the article explains, it won't even cover the base hardware costs. So you won't be "paying your part". The only reason to offer something like this is to "up-sell" to an actual properly paid plan, and since you will also lose quite a large percentage to payment processor fees, have extra support/admin overhead, deal with users who now feel entitles to "paid support", having a $1 or $2/month price point is just not worth it.
You will either need pay for it, or do it yourself on a cheap Linode VPS or Hetzner machine or whatnot.
I pay myself for Fastmail and think that is a reasonable price. 2$ was a number, 4 or 5 would probably also do. Just something that can some out of the latte budget.
Do you pay $5 a month for lattes, or $20 a month for lattes?
Why do you even need docker for that?
Just use systemd and cgroups to manage it.
It's not why do you need it, it's that there's 2000 people that know how to do it with docker for every person that knows how to do it with cgroups. And your question is probably just signaling you're in the second group (I'm in the first).
Would be curious about any tutorials you recommend on doing that.
Systemd runs things in cgroups by default, so installing the postgres package from your systemd distro's official repos and ensuring that is enabled and running will get you postgres in cgroups to start with. From there you can check the systemd.resource-control(5) man page for some potentially interesting tunables.
Skill issue ig. The ease of portability and I like Swarm a lot.
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
[0]: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql
You can run a Postgres on Fly.io full time for just slight more than $2.
It's not a great business though. The compromise you're making is that we don't manage it. It'll probably stay running, it's likely to be worry free (especially if you barely use it), but if anything goes wrong it's up to you.
You could also spin up a VM for cheap somewhere, install Postgres, and just let it be.
Managed databases are expensive to run – worry free costs quite a bit of money to ensure. Maybe you don't need that for a hobby project?
It's not a great business though. The compromise you're making is that we don't manage it. It'll probably stay running, it's likely to be worry free (especially if you barely use it), but if anything goes wrong it's up to you.
You could also spin up a VM for cheap somewhere, install Postgres, and just let it be.
Managed databases are expensive to run – worry free costs quite a bit of money to ensure. Maybe you don't need that for a hobby project?
I just now realize who you are!
I can add, that I actually had this setup running on Fly for a small analytics backend for a low volume website.
When I tried to login to the interface after some months I discovered that everything had been broken for at least some weeks - to a degree that I could not recover anything from the volume.
Love the business model! Ability to just load 50$ on to my account and let is run.
But I don't dare to use your services to anything but ephemeral dev envs.
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.
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.
This is one of those instances where an unmanaged single node Postgres sucks to use.
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)
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.
Where does that $2 a month price come from?
You could choose a webhost with a database included.
You could choose a webhost with a database included.
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.
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.
Keeping it running with no users is easy. Keeping it running when someone ships an app that blows the DB up is hard.
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.
I just want to pay the cost price for an equally scaled down offering.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I explicitly wrote "[same] limits as what these free databases offer". So there is no additional entitlement by taking payment.
I honestly believe that's what _you_ would expect for your $2/month.
And if everybody in the world was like you, it'd make sense for them to do it.
But...
You've met _people_, right? Enough of them are way too insane and over entitled, and ruin it for everybody else.
And I think you misunderstand the credit card fraud risk here. It's not "abusive users" trying to buy your service at $5 or $2. It's _because_ the monthly price is so low that you become a fraud target for proper who were never interested un becoming a user. Criminals intentionally find and use low value purchase options with real time card processing, so they can "test" card details they have are valid right before making a big purchase if the small one succeeds. I've been on both ends of that, I've seen purchase of a dollar or two on one of my cards right before an attempt to buy a thousand bucks worth of electronics (which my Visa issuer blocked). I've also been involved in a website that mostly dealt in 50+ dollar purchases that without thinking/knowing added a $1.95 novelty sticker pack - and a few weeks later had several hundred purchases using stolen credit cards overnight. It happens.
I honestly believe that's what _you_ would expect for your $2/month.
And if everybody in the world was like you, it'd make sense for them to do it.
But...
You've met _people_, right? Enough of them are way too insane and over entitled, and ruin it for everybody else.
And I think you misunderstand the credit card fraud risk here. It's not "abusive users" trying to buy your service at $5 or $2. It's _because_ the monthly price is so low that you become a fraud target for proper who were never interested un becoming a user. Criminals intentionally find and use low value purchase options with real time card processing, so they can "test" card details they have are valid right before making a big purchase if the small one succeeds. I've been on both ends of that, I've seen purchase of a dollar or two on one of my cards right before an attempt to buy a thousand bucks worth of electronics (which my Visa issuer blocked). I've also been involved in a website that mostly dealt in 50+ dollar purchases that without thinking/knowing added a $1.95 novelty sticker pack - and a few weeks later had several hundred purchases using stolen credit cards overnight. It happens.
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/
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/
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
Point is that I don't want something for free, I want to pay for it.
But not enough to actually make it worth it to deal with customers. Aka you're just not worth it as a customer, sorry.
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.
You're better off just self-hosting postgres in docker on your own vps for $4-5/month.
Well, the company behind the post offers it for free. They certainly should be able to offer it for 2$?
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?
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?
More hassle free than serving these 100 customers for free.
Especially if you only offer 2 year prepaid options.
Especially if you only offer 2 year prepaid options.
Are you really having such a hard time understanding that your 2usd isnt better than a free tier from a business pov?
[deleted]
Supabase is free but only slept after 1 week of inactivity.
just get a vm on something like Vultr and install postgres on it
Something I'd love to understand is the latency model for hosted databases like this. Every production web app or backend I've worked on has pretty much depended on having 1-3ms latency to the database. That's easy when you're deploying your own hardware, and in my experience easy when you use a cloud provider's hosted offering in the same zone, and fine within the region.
So how does this work? I sign up and get a Postgres connection string. Where is it? Because the where _really_ matters. Do Xata and the other examples of this all deploy into all the cloud providers and all the regions and let you choose which one? That feels like a big duplication of effort and like it would be harder to get critical mass in order to get the unit economics to work. Or do people just put up with a database 10ms away?
So how does this work? I sign up and get a Postgres connection string. Where is it? Because the where _really_ matters. Do Xata and the other examples of this all deploy into all the cloud providers and all the regions and let you choose which one? That feels like a big duplication of effort and like it would be harder to get critical mass in order to get the unit economics to work. Or do people just put up with a database 10ms away?
They let you choose a region. Here is Xata’s region list:
https://xata.io/docs/getting-started/available-regions
Looks like it’s using AWS Aurora under the hood:
https://xata.io/blog/serverless-postgres-platform
But also, they’ve done some work to reduce the number of network round trips that Postgres needs to respond to a query. For many situations, SQL over HTTPS is used. In JavaScript, the database driver is a wrapper around a fetch request.
Xata seems to have its own SDK with higher-level API’s to reduce round trips.
Also: https://xata.io/blog/geo-distributed-postgres
Meanwhile, here’s Neon’s blog post on their connection options:
https://neon.tech/blog/http-vs-websockets-for-postgres-queri...
https://xata.io/docs/getting-started/available-regions
Looks like it’s using AWS Aurora under the hood:
https://xata.io/blog/serverless-postgres-platform
But also, they’ve done some work to reduce the number of network round trips that Postgres needs to respond to a query. For many situations, SQL over HTTPS is used. In JavaScript, the database driver is a wrapper around a fetch request.
Xata seems to have its own SDK with higher-level API’s to reduce round trips.
Also: https://xata.io/blog/geo-distributed-postgres
Meanwhile, here’s Neon’s blog post on their connection options:
https://neon.tech/blog/http-vs-websockets-for-postgres-queri...
Every one I’ve used is on AWS and will tell you the zone so you can keep things within the region/zone. That includes Heroku, Supabase, Neon, and (obviously) RDS.
That said, I’ve used AWS DBs with Cloudflare pages and the latency isn’t a major issue. If you are running non geo-distributed DB, the DB is a lot further than 10ms away from your average user.
That said, I’ve used AWS DBs with Cloudflare pages and the latency isn’t a major issue. If you are running non geo-distributed DB, the DB is a lot further than 10ms away from your average user.
In my experience, applications tend to do far more DB queries than users do backend requests, and as such, 50ms to the user matters much less than the difference between 1 and 10ms on DB queries.
That said, thanks for the experience. Do they also tend to launch in other cloud providers? It seems like it would be a tricky business to navigate, restricting your customer base to specific providers.
That said, thanks for the experience. Do they also tend to launch in other cloud providers? It seems like it would be a tricky business to navigate, restricting your customer base to specific providers.
Some SaaS providers will let you choose your cloud and set up their services there.
As for the latency, it might not matter for all applications, or it may encourage the devs to spend more time optimizing the number of SQL queries.
As for the latency, it might not matter for all applications, or it may encourage the devs to spend more time optimizing the number of SQL queries.
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
> 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
[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.
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.
I have had to correct others in our Discord server for instance too.
It wasn't that way last year, and coldstarts were measured in seconds.
I went all the way back to just a few days after I started[0]. I can't find any restrictions on the free tier uptime for the primary/main database in any of the Wayback Machine snapshots of https://neon.tech/pricing.
Last year we did take a lot of heat for cold starts. Here are two blog posts which discuss how we have worked on cold starts.
1. https://neon.tech/blog/cold-starts-just-got-hot
2. https://neon.tech/blog/posix_spawn-close_range-fixed-cold-st...
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230517084346/https://neon.tech...
Last year we did take a lot of heat for cold starts. Here are two blog posts which discuss how we have worked on cold starts.
1. https://neon.tech/blog/cold-starts-just-got-hot
2. https://neon.tech/blog/posix_spawn-close_range-fixed-cold-st...
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230517084346/https://neon.tech...
I can't say this is the disconnect some are having, but it's the one I did until just now. I read "24/7 compute" and assumed that meant no cold starts. It really meant "up to 24/7 uptime but it will still scale to 0 and require cold starts."
The free tier has mentioned that auto-suspend isn't configurable on the free tier for every archive I could find on the Wayback Machine.
If you want an always on compute on the free tier, you can just setup a cron job, and every 4 minutes or so send a "SELECT 1" which will keep the database awake.
If you want an always on compute on the free tier, you can just setup a cron job, and every 4 minutes or so send a "SELECT 1" which will keep the database awake.
There’s a disconnect here. You are 100% technically correct. Your product’s messaging is confusing. Saying “24/7 compute” makes some people think no cold starts. Enough people in fact that you have to keep correcting them.
Nobody knows your product as well as you do.
Nobody knows your product as well as you do.
I'll provide this feedback. Thanks for your explanation.
Are the servers hugged to death? all I get is a picture of a harddrive and "something went wrong".
i could see all the "static" content, but validating email or the dashboard just fail.
i could see all the "static" content, but validating email or the dashboard just fail.
The web page is working for me. Can you give your web browser and operating system specs?
firefox with standard install of ublockorigin.
console gives some js error about preloading a css url
console gives some js error about preloading a css url
I'm also on Firefox with tracking protection and uBlock Origin. Can you give the full error?
sent at the time via the "send feed back" link on the site.
For free layer: can it lose my data? Has data been replicated and be picked up if server dies?
[deleted]
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"
"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"
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.
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
Last year I was playing around with Neon and the cold starts were slow enough that I implemented a “Loading…” dialog box.
I haven’t touched it in a year, but I tried it just now and it still works. Cold startup for the Deno Fresh instance and the database query were about 700ms each, assuming I interpreted my logs correctly.
Subjectively, it’s slow enough that it’s worth putting up a dialog box, but it disappears fast enough that you don’t need a spinner or progress bar. A meta-refresh of one second seems good enough.
(I’m in California but the demo uses an East Coast instance for Neon. I set it up that way because I wanted to know how it would feel.)
Demo: https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/
Source code: https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/
I haven’t touched it in a year, but I tried it just now and it still works. Cold startup for the Deno Fresh instance and the database query were about 700ms each, assuming I interpreted my logs correctly.
Subjectively, it’s slow enough that it’s worth putting up a dialog box, but it disappears fast enough that you don’t need a spinner or progress bar. A meta-refresh of one second seems good enough.
(I’m in California but the demo uses an East Coast instance for Neon. I set it up that way because I wanted to know how it would feel.)
Demo: https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/
Source code: https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/
We also have this demo:
https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres
(Neon Employee)
https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres
(Neon Employee)
This seems great.
I was looking for a free cloud database I could use to host some shared data for my small free open source project and this should do nicely.
I probably wont ever even use more than a dozen MB or so and such low traffic.
Basically it's an app for remote controlling home theater equipment, and I wanted to give users of the app a centralized database to add the little text commands that they find and use for their various device control. So that new users can get a list of commands that other users have written/found for specific devices instead of having to go to the command doc themselves every time.
And I doubt ill ever have more than maybe a couple hundred users tops.
I was looking for a free cloud database I could use to host some shared data for my small free open source project and this should do nicely.
I probably wont ever even use more than a dozen MB or so and such low traffic.
Basically it's an app for remote controlling home theater equipment, and I wanted to give users of the app a centralized database to add the little text commands that they find and use for their various device control. So that new users can get a list of commands that other users have written/found for specific devices instead of having to go to the command doc themselves every time.
And I doubt ill ever have more than maybe a couple hundred users tops.
Last I checked: Supabase deactivates after 1 week, Render deletes after 90+14 days.
At bit.io, _if_ you ran the database on the free tier for the full month, it cost us around $0.83. We scaled to zero, so the most common case was that free tier DBs cost us about 1/30th of that. That database was running on its own pod, isolated from every other database.
Startup time after you scaled to zero was 250ms.
I've been wondering this for a while -- why are people using DBaaS?
Wouldn't you use an AMI of choice, self-host, or use one of the cloud native solutions? Seems like piping all your DB calls outside your VPC would have a lot of downsides, not the least of which is a lot of latency (I get there is peering infrastructure). Also, there are security issues to contend with, threat surface is much larger with a DB available to the internet vs a DB on a segmented private network only available to the middle tier.
Is it a cost thing? Is something like xata or neon cheaper than say AWS Aurora? I don't see how it could be cheaper with all the inherent egress costs.
Wouldn't you use an AMI of choice, self-host, or use one of the cloud native solutions? Seems like piping all your DB calls outside your VPC would have a lot of downsides, not the least of which is a lot of latency (I get there is peering infrastructure). Also, there are security issues to contend with, threat surface is much larger with a DB available to the internet vs a DB on a segmented private network only available to the middle tier.
Is it a cost thing? Is something like xata or neon cheaper than say AWS Aurora? I don't see how it could be cheaper with all the inherent egress costs.
Looking at the pricing for those AWS instance types ("db.t4g.medium" and "r6gd.large.search"), then looking at co-location costs... I wonder if they have enough clusters that it would make sense to move some to co-location?
I guess if their customers are mostly already using AWS, that would be a bad idea because of AWS data transfer fees then applying?
I guess if their customers are mostly already using AWS, that would be a bad idea because of AWS data transfer fees then applying?
[deleted]
from their homepage
> Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL.
ummm. what about https://neon.tech/?
> Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL.
ummm. what about https://neon.tech/?
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.
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.
do you guys host within aws? one thing that keepsme gong back to drds is always latency and egress fees. its nice to have a db thats in the same data center as my api server.
hi, yes, we are on AWS and offer several regions: https://xata.io/docs/getting-started/available-regions
Wow, I usually hate marketing pages but that one is awesome
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?