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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

What does crunchy cost? Page says to ask, typically meaning you can’t afford. Wonder if it is feasible for a small company. Is it competitive with RDS?

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The starting prices for hobby instances [0] (i.e. development) are about half of what you would pay for AWS RDS [1]. If you choose to have high availability then prices are equal in this case. This is for Crunchy Bridge, which has a calculator on the website. Although, similar to Amazon RDS the prices increase dramatically as you get a decent machine to run your database and increase storage size. I'm using us-east-1 for the comparison.

Honestly, as always, I think these managed database services are way too expensive. If I really needed to choose one of them I would go with the AWS service, because you also have to factor in data egress costs in your cloud costs calculation which will vary a lot depending on your workload.

[0]: https://www.crunchydata.com/pricing/calculator?provider=aws&...

[1]: https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSPostgreSQL

They have a hosted on major clouds service called crunchybridge which seems reasonably priced.

https://www.crunchydata.com/pricing/calculator

It's quite a bit more than RDS/cloud provider managed. I don't see a reason to use them vs a cloud provider native service if you're already in the cloud provider hotel california.

Product manager here from Crunchy, we aim to be quite in line with any of the major cloud providers. A number of customers have moved over from each of the major cloud providers to see better price to performance and quality of support.

Just as a data point: we are planning to move to Crunchy and away from Heroku soon. We tested the two, and we have 4X improved performance on Crunchy Postgres vs Heroku Postgres.

4X. We were astounded. And so we’re the Heroku folks I talked to, who I’m guessing will want to try to bring performance boosts.

We haven’t done the switch quite yet because we’re waiting on Crunchy to bring out their Heroku Dataclips replacement, which is something we rely on a lot. But once it’s ready, we’re going to switch!

We're used to seeing performance gains, but also wow. This is great to hear, so thanks for sharing.

Dataclips equivalent is coming, we're hoping to release sometime in March.

That's great news! We're happy to try it out, since that's the one thing holding us up from making a bunch more big databases on your platform :)

Just curious, what’s special with heroku dataclips? You can host and use any bi tool which has similar functionality (last one i used was redash)

We can! But setting up Heroku Dataclips takes precisely 0 working days/minutes/seconds. So it's sheer laziness :)

Great. Wonder if you offer any a la carte consulting on modeling, performance, etc? Wouldn't need it often, but rather occasional "ask an expert" when when hitting a bottleneck. This is a bit different than support.

We don't do this so much a la carte for non customers, but definitely have it available for any of our existing customers. It's a common request, and we in general just stay very busy with it already. For customers I often tell them start with a support request to start... often in 15-30 minutes we can help give some insights that are helpful without having to go for a bucket of consulting hours, it just depends what and how much folks need.

Thanks, yes definitely meant as an already customer. In other words a single contact for db things.

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