My $5 VPS can handle more queries in an hour. Like, I realize there’s more included, but…
Is it truly impossible to serve this stuff somewhere closer to cost? If this is close to cost, is this truly as efficient as it gets?
The pricing you are citing is for Accelerate, which does advanced connection pooling and query caching across 300 POPs globally.
All that being said, we'll def address the "can you pls make Prisma Postgres pricing simpler to grok?" question before we GA this thing. Thanks for the feedback!
I rationally realize there is a price/usage point where this makes sense, but emotionally it doesn’t feel good.
Start the plan at $59 and include 2M queries.
more here: https://www.prisma.io/docs/accelerate/connection-pooling
also recommend trying out the Accelerate speed test to get a "feel for it": https://accelerate-speed-test.prisma.io/
Nonetheless, we absolutely have room for improvement on the ORM in terms of performance, and are working on those as well!
1) 60k queries? I burn through that in an hour. All it takes is the Google bot and some shitty AI scraper to come along and crawl our site - which happens every single day.
2) $18 per million? I don't know how many queries I need per day, at the moment, but give 1), I will surely burn through a million dozens of times oer months...
...at which point this thing will be just as expensive as an RDS instance on AWS, potentially even more so if we hit traffic peaks (every single user causes hundreds of queries, if not thousands).
3) I don't even understand who to interpret the egress cost. No idea how to predict what the pricing will be. Maybe some calculator where we can slot in the relevant estimated values would be nice?
What's your take on the pricing calculator? We've been working on an improved version, and would love to hear your thoughts on this. In your case, what inputs would you find helpful to put in to arrive at a calculation, considering that you're unsure about projecting both queries and egress? How would you go about putting in estimated values for those?
Prisma announced Accelerate on January 16, 2023
But you are right, they are close in functionality though Hyperdrive requires a CF Worker to operate.
All that being said, if there are specific questions that you have which relate to a use case, ask away!
For example, I used Aurora Serverless v2 in a deployment, and eventually it just made sense to use a reserved instance because the fee structure doesn't make sense.
If I actually scale my app on these infrastructuers, I pay way more. I feel it's only great for products that _arent_ successful.
Bingo. The pricing alignment makes sense:
You share the risk of idle, but provided capacity with the provider: no fixed capacity for no fixed pricing.
The capex for the provider are fixed, though.
That's why I think more competition in the serverless Postgres space is fantastic: Sure, it's not a pure price competition, providers try to bundle with slightly different customer groups they focus on.
But underneath it, technology is being built which will make offering serverless ever more cost effective.
We might see a day where serverless (i.e. unbundeled storage and computed) with dedicated compute is cheaper than standalone GCP/ AWS/ Azure Postgres.
We are also working on making this simpler to understand. We want to make sure our pricing is as easy to grok and as affordable as possible. Keep an eye out for improvements as we get to GA!
60k are included.
But, I totally agree to your overall statement. The premium for hosted DBs is quite high despite the competition.
Usually, if you want hardware to handle real world production data volumes (not 1 vCPU and 512MB, but more like 4 vCPUs and 8G) you are very soon around $200 to $300. A VPC with that size is around $15?
The hosted solutions are just so damn easy to get started.
Often these types of SaaS are hyper cloud backed so their own costs tend to be high
Don’t know whether that’s the case here. Agreed though that pricing also raised my eyebrows
Honestly I'm surprised they lasted this long.
OS' are pretty stable these days, and you can containerize on your server to keep environments separate, and duplicate
I guess it just comes with experience, but at the same time, the devops skillsets necessary for dealing with serverless stuff is also totally out of this world. most places I've worked at, marketing hasn't even launched a campaign, there is no product validation about how much traffic you'll get, and you're optimizing for all this scale that's never going to happen
I do hope tomorrow's engineers won't have to learn devops to use the cloud. My team works on what we think is the better way to do serverless, check it out! https://dbos.dev/
I saw them hiring Rust devs recently, which makes me feel like they do things efficiently(hopefully). That being said, Serverless is the greed-driven-model, where you start by thinking, "meh, we don't need that many queries/executions/whatever anyways, we will save plenty mulas we'd waste otherwise renting a reserved instance sitting idle most of the time", then something bad happens and you overrun the bill and then go into "sh+t, need to always rent that higher tier, else we risk going bankrupt" and since your stuff is already built, you can no longer change your stuff without another big re-write and fear or breaking things.
With most of these serverless providers, there's no technological lock in I am aware of, it's all just Postgres features paired with DevOps convenience.
I don't know why people ever buy plane tickets, walking's free.
With the Prisma pricing, $1k gets you up to a 48req/s load average, and that's without the geo balancing. For a little more you can get a dedicated Postgres instance with 128GB memory and 1TB+ of disk on DO that would definitely handle magnitudes more load.
Of course there are a bunch of trade-offs, but as the original poster said the gap is pretty wide/wild.
The point is that when I buy managed postgres, the thing I expect to be paying for is, well, postgres. Not a bunch of geo load balancing that I’m never going to need.
That’s why the comparison is with the thing that actually does what I want.