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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

neon.tech's offering looks good - the $69 offering.

Any reviews?

Isn't the storage kinda expensive? It's $15 per 10 GiB, which is ~10x more expensive than AWS SSD storage and ~100x more than bulk storage with an S3-like service. It's $1500 per TiB, which is a lot of money. I guess it might not be designed for time series data like I am used to collecting, which requires thinking on the TiB scale at the very least.

I do appreciate it's Apache 2.0 licensed, so you can run it yourself. I can't complain too much about pricing for what looks to be my dream database that I have always wanted with branching and separated storage and compute.

To be fair to neon: you get free point in time recovery, HA, branching, automatic scaling without downtime, and read replicas (that also automatically scale).

Yea, it's not really a product for the type of massive bulk storage I'm thinking about. This seems more like the database you use for everything that isn't the bulk storage. Things that get read/written to often enough to care about versioning and HA and all those other things. Time series bulk data wouldn't be a good application for their managed service since it's usually "write once, read sometimes, store cheap".

> Isn't the storage kinda expensive?

Depends on the actual performance. Normal EBS is dead slow but you can pay for the IoPs.

Yeah that storage pricing is a killer. Given Aurora is $0.1/GB, I just wouldn't even consider this.

Neon is a lot more than just storage. It's branching, autoscaling, (cheap) read replicas, serverless computing, etc. If you only care about storage pricing, Neon is not the service for you. As you've said, storage pricing is cheaper elsewhere.

Sure, but I've got serverless computing with Aurora v2. I've got upto 15 read replicas, blue/green deployments, upto 128 cores per replica at a cheaper price... I'm just not really thinking that a bit of branching will make up for a 10x or more increase in cost.

Those increased storage costs make the decoupled compute and the associated auto-scaling benefits almost irrelevant as far as the overall cost picture goes.

We have former Aurora users come to Neon who tell us they saved money by switching. If someone like yourself were to migrate, they definitely would be an enterprise sale, which has different pricing than what is available in our current tiers.

What counts as storage? There’s a huge difference between storage vs database size as there’s a huge overhead otherwise.

RDS and Aurora usage just keeps growing even if you don’t have much real data.

I've used it, it's one of the only dbs you can use for free. It's extremely easy to get started. The only thing I'm worried about is the bait and switch, the offering is so much better than the alternative that I'm certain there will be a squeeze eventually.

I don't understand the business model. I guess the goal is to be acquired by AWS/GCP/Azure etc?

It's cheap to have a live db because the compute is detached from storage. This means they can spin up your compute on demand. While the compute is running it's around the same price as aws, gcp, azure, etc but you pay for more storage because it's replicated. One really nice thing about this is that you do not need to shut down the db to upgrade the machine and you get what are essentially free read replicas.

I think the business model makes sense, I just think they will eventually raise prices because they can.

1) That's how e.g. RDS is already implemented, right? It's an AWS cash cow.

2) Who is going to use an external (from the perspective of your cloud or internal work load) RDBMS?

RDS isn't implemented like that and if you are on AWS you can get neon to be in the same datacenter and even pay via AWS.

I don't work for neon, I've just gone pretty deep on all the managed db offerings.

(As in "compute is detached from storage", not all of the specifics.)

> if you are on AWS you can get neon to be in the same datacenter and even pay via AWS

Nice.

As the title says... Aurora is somewhat implemented like that.

RDS just runs regular database servers and provides some nice management automation around it.

The business model is to sell a Database as a Service, similar to Mongo, DataStax, etc.

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