Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of extra costs in RDS that this calculation excludes: bandwidth, disk I/O, storage and backups. All that stuff is included in Heroku Postgres. Also, you're likely to get much better perf out of the $50 Heroku plan than the cheapest RDS plan because it's a slice of a bigger instance, rather than an underpowered VM.

So the real total cost comparison is a lot closer than it seems.

I've been considering using CartoDB to replace Heroku. I only use basic geo stuff and their maps would be handy. The specs don't really tell you want you get for you money, there's a $29 which might be ok. http://cartodb.com/pricing/

In terms of what do you want the recommendation? Pricing? Performance? Scalability? Availability? Tech support?

I would go with Heroku or AWS RDS. Both truly deliver and make devs / devops sleep better.

Price/Performance. Most my apps low traffic so scalability and availability not that critical.