By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you've likely got so much momentum that getting off is nearly impossible as you bleed cash.
You can buy a used server and find colocation space and still be pennies on the dollar for even the smallest database. If you're doing more than prototyping, you're probably wasting money.
I’ve been the guy managing a critical self-hosted database in a small team, and it’s such a distraction from focusing on the actual core product.
To me, the cost of RDS covers tons of risks and time sinks: having to document the db server setup so I’m not the only one on the team who actually knows how to operate it, setting up monitoring, foolproof backups so I don’t need to worry that they’re silently failing because a volume is full and I misconfigured the monitoring, PITR for when someone ships a bad migration, one click HA so the database itself is very unlikely to wake me at 3am, blue/green deploys to make major version upgrades totally painless, never having to think about hardware failures or borked dist-upgrades, and so on.
Each of those is ultimately either undifferentiated work to develop in-house RDS features that could have been better spent on product, or a risk of significant data loss, downtime, or firefighting. RDS looks like a pretty good deal, up to a point.
RDS is a great choice, for prototyping and only for production if you know what you're doing when setting it up.
FWIW, this is common in all cloud deployments, people assume that running something "severless" is a magical silver bullet.
Maybe it takes you a month the first time around and a week the 10th time around. First product suffers, the other products not so much. Now it just takes a week of your time and does not require you to pay large AWS fees, which means you are not bleeding money
I like to set up scrappy products that do not rack up large monthly fees. This means I can let them run unprofitable for longer and I don't have to seek an investor early, which would light up a large fire under everyone's butts and start influencing timelines because now they have the money and want a return asap.
I'll launch a week later - no biggie usually. I could have come up with the idea a month later, so I'm still 3 weeks early ;)
It doesn't work for all projects, obviously, but I've seen plenty of SaaS start out with a shopping spree, then pay monthly fees and purchase licenses for stuff that they could have set up for free if they put some (usually not a lot) effort into it. When times get rough, the shorter runway becomes a hard fact of life. Maybe they wouldn't have needed a VC and could have bootstrapped and also survived for longer.
While I generally agree as far as initial setup time goes, I favor RDS because I can forget about it, whereas the hand rolled version demands ongoing maintenance, and incurs a nonzero chance of simple mistakes that, if made, could result in a 100% dataloss unrecoverable scenario.
I’m also mostly talking about typical, funded startups here, as opposed to indie/solo devs. If you’re flying solo launching a tiny proof of concept that may only ever have a few users, by all means run it yourself if you’d like, but if you’ve raised money to grow faster and are paying employees to iterate rapidly searching for PMF…just pay for RDS and make sure as much time as possible is spent on product features that provide actual business value. It starts at like $15/month. The cost of simply not being laser-focused on product is far greater.
Databases are not particularly difficult to migrate between machines. Of all the cloud services to migrate, they might actually be the easiest, since the databases don't have different API's that need to be rewritten for, and database replication is a well-established thing.
Getting off is quite the opposite of nearly impossible.
Optionality and flexibility are extremely valuable, and that is why cloud compute continues to be popular, especially for rapidly/burstily growing businesses like startups.
If you want a different opportunity cost, get people with different experience. If RDS is objectively expensive, objectively slow, but subjectively easy, change the subject.
I don't think that's accurate. I've self-managed databases, and I still think that RDS is compelling for small engineering teams.
There's a lot to get right when managing a database, and it's easy to screw something up. Perhaps none of the individual parts are super-complicated, but the cost of failure is high. Outsourcing that cost to AWS is pretty compelling.
At a certain team size, you'll end up with a section of the team that's dedicated to these sorts of careful processes. But the first place these issues come up is with the database, and if you can put off that bit of organizational scaling until later, then that's a great path to choose.
Its about tradeoffs, and some tradeoffs are often more applicable than others - getting a ping at 7am on a Sunday because your ec2 instance filled it's drive up with logs and your log rotation script failed because it didn't have a long enough retey is a problem I'm happy to outsource when I should be focusing on the actual app.
If the cost of a hosted DB is going to sink the company, then of course, I will figure it out and run it myself. But it’s not, for most startups. And therefore that knowledge isn’t providing much leverage.
Starting an AI company with deep expertise in training models - that is an example of knowledge providing huge leverage. DB tech is not in this bucket for most businesses.