Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups.
I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB).
Additionally, my web app is a Kotlin API and a Nuxt.js SSR server, so I think I'd have to set it up as two separate "apps" on this platform. That means I'd be going from $5/mo to $25/mo.
On one hand, that's not a ton in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the whole reason I use DigitalOcean and self manage my infrastructure is to _not_ have to pay that kind of money for my projects with no revenue.
This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself, but for just $10 / mo (5->15) you don't have to worry about it. That's really what they're selling.
$120 / year for peace of mind that your production DB is backed up is well worth it for a lot of people, especially if the alternative is potentially a bug in a homegrown shell script which could silently fail catastrophically and lose your whole DB.
If you're going to do this yourself, Caprover is the best.
Cram it into that $5/month, bump the swap to 2GB and then deploy your DB into it... backups are supported if you just straight up map a persistent volume out to your B2 (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410)
Edit: Be aware during automated upgrades you will trip CPU alarms.
I think you're stating the reasons already. There are people who don't want to self manage. They want a fully managed solution and don't want to think about the ops.
In my experience, the Heroku $9/mo plan isn't usable for anything production-ready. I had to upgrade to the next tier when I crossed about 100 active users. For $9/mo, you're also getting a pretty prohibitive row limit and a really low connection limit. DO's $7/mo dev database is more in line with Heroku's dev offering.
I've given some thought to the PG offering -- $15/mo is really just for a dev instance with some minimal backup, it costs more to do anything production-level.
My conclusion -- YMMV! -- is that I'd happily pay that much to "set and forget" the DB in a proof-of-concept or hobby context. I realize it's not perfect, and there are cheaper options, but I really think they gave us a cheap-enough deal, and you can always play sysadmin if it's too much for you.
I'm not a big DO customer but I appreciate their pricing transparency: having worked professionally with 2/3 of the major Cloud companies I would never put anything there that's billed to my own account.
A small note, the DigitalOcean dev DBs do have daily backups though these are not accessible by the user and only come into play when there is a non-recoverable issue with the node they are on.
I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB).
Additionally, my web app is a Kotlin API and a Nuxt.js SSR server, so I think I'd have to set it up as two separate "apps" on this platform. That means I'd be going from $5/mo to $25/mo.
On one hand, that's not a ton in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the whole reason I use DigitalOcean and self manage my infrastructure is to _not_ have to pay that kind of money for my projects with no revenue.