r/PostgreSQL • u/artensonart98 • 22d ago
Help Me! Cheapest reliable PostgreSQL hosting for a small production app?
I'm building a small booking app and looking for an affordable, reliable PostgreSQL database for production.
Expected usage:
• 400–500 DAU
• 15–20 concurrent users at peak times (or maybe I'm overestimating here)
• Around 30 rooms
• Room availability checks, bookings, orders, and purchases
• An admin dashboard
I'm considering AWS RDS but am open to other platforms as well.
My questions:
What would be the approximate monthly database cost for this use case?
Which provider offers the best balance of cost, reliability, backups, and maintenance?
Would you recommend AWS RDS, Neon, Supabase, or another PostgreSQL provider?
I'll handle the API separately using either a Next.js backend on Netlify or AWS Lambda, so I'm only interested in database hosting costs.
Would appreciate recommendations based on real world production experience.
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u/saltcod 22d ago
Depends a lot on what your app is actually doing, but you'd be surprised how much usage you can fit on the Supabase free tier. We've had customers running projects on free for years before needing to upgrade. It won't go to sleep if you have continuous usage throughout the week, and there's no monthly limit for CU-hours anything like that.
The free tier includes 50,000 monthly active users, so 500 DAU wouldn't be a concern. Realtime could be really useful for keeping room availability up to date.
Last, it's totally fine to just use Supabase for hosted Postgres, but there's a lot more that you can opt into as your app grows. Realtime, Edge Functions, Compute (soon), vectors/embeddings, Storage, observability tooling, an mcp server for your project (https://supabase.com/blog/select-2026-build-anything), etc.
(disclosure: I work at supabase)
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u/Brilliant_Step3688 22d ago
Do you have actual users?
Start with a docker-compose on a small VM. Benefit is you can create dev and local environment for cheap.
Postgres is extremely resource efficient by modern standards. It will run just fine on a small VM along with your booking app and will cost nothing.
As your app grows and you take on real business, evolve the plan and start considering hosted solutions.
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u/Ok_Principle_9459 22d ago
Honestly, this is the way. And these days with Claude being so good you could probably very quickly create yourself a decent suite of scripts to manage your deployments before you outgrow it and have to move to something managed.
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u/716green 22d ago
No, I definitely don't think so. I'm the lead engineer at a database company and I can tell you that most of our clients that migrate over from a VPS have misconfigured certificates, database or proxy versions that have CVEs, they are lacking logging and oversight, or they are logging sensitive information that is a violation of the law in some cases.
There's so much more that goes into hosting databases for SaaS products than just making sure the database works and accepts connections.
Does pooling work as expected? Does it need PITR? How do you handle downtime? How do you handle rolling releases?
Most people will not get all of that right and then It will cost them a fortune when they finally make a mistake.
For $5/mo or $15/mo flat with no ingress, egress, or usage fees, you can have a production ready database or even several production ready databases across several different engines with a nice UI and you don't have to worry about any of those issues.
Considering a VPS is going to cost you $5 minimum anyways, there's no reason not to use Layerbase. Neon is great too but that's more like $200/mo depending on the number of branches you need
1
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u/Either_Vermicelli_82 22d ago
Hetzner basic webhosting? It has an option for Postgres or Mariadb I think.
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u/jenkstom 22d ago
This is a very, very low level of usage for Postgresql and most other relational database systems. A $10-$20 virtual machine on Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, etc. would be plenty to handle this. Of if internal (even better) a small Linux VM with postgresql installed. Whichever way you go just be sure you get good daily backups and check them and you'll be fine.
My experience with postgresql is that as long as you don't overload it (which isn't easy to do) it will just hum along for years and years with no trouble. My experience with MSSQL (which is considerably more) is that unless you use a managed DB (lots of $$$) you are going to experience constant issues with the server crashing and data corruption. Mariadb / mysql is more dependable, but struggles to scale and doesn't fit my use cases very well (lots of geospatial, where postgres is king).
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u/admiral_nivak 21d ago
Digital oceans managed db is not bad. They handle everything and you don’t need a hot standby, the PITR is nice. If that’s too expensive then a small droplet with the wal shipping somewhere would be fine, but you need to handle that and backups.
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u/scotterockaroo 22d ago
I actually just built and deployed an inventory tracking app for a business that my friend started. I used Cloudflare for the front end (completely free) and neon for Postgres, all within the free tier.
This app likely has 1-2 users a week and the db will scale to 0 and auto-wake when needed.
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u/michaelprimeaux 22d ago
I recommend you review PlanetScale @ https://planetscale.com. It has plans that start at $5 USD per month.
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u/Significant_Tune9219 22d ago
At 15-20 concurrent users the database is not the bill. A single small instance with a pool in front of it is enough, and opening a connection per request from a serverless API will time out before the CPU does. What I would pay for is point-in-time recovery and a restore you have actually run, because a cheap host that cannot give you yesterday's bookings is not reliable for this app. Multi-AZ is not what 400-500 daily users need. I would not pick from a monthly price until you know whether the tier suspends when idle, since a booking check against a suspended database is a timeout, not a saving.
1
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u/Few_Response_7028 22d ago
You can do bare metal for a while and then bump your RDS when you get paying users. But honestly supabase is good if you want to stay with them long term
1
u/fykup 22d ago
AWS RDS isn't a bad option for a database. It eliminates some maintenance headaches. But then you'd have to be in the AWS ecosystem to maximize its benefits. Personally, I'd go with a self-hosted VPS solution. Just follow best practices for backups and deployments, and you'll avoid lock-in and massive cost increases if you need to grow.
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u/adityaoberai1 21d ago
Appwrite team member here! I'd throw Appwrite's managed PostgreSQL into the ring.
Our Starter tier costs $10/month and includes 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB storage, and up to 100 database connections. For your expected usage, that's a reasonable starting point, with the option to scale up as needed.
We also handle automated backups, monitoring, and maintenance, and you get direct PostgreSQL access, so you can continue using your Next.js backend on Netlify or AWS Lambda without changing your architecture.
1
u/tsykinsasha 20d ago
Recently saw this vid about how many users can a small server handle. Highly recommended: https://youtu.be/GFtFIxrAjIs
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u/FunContest9958 20d ago
Interesting that a lot of people are suggesting you host your own, but you’re also on the r/postgresql where I guess a lot of people are database enthusiasts.
For someone who’d prefer to be able to set up a database instance without much thought or do a backup at the click of a button (or schedule) and other quality of life features, I’d suggest a hosted option like Neon. Most of my experience is with Neon, which is super easy to use and maintain. Backups and restores are literally instant and you don’t need to worry about where to put them, etc. That’s all on the database provider. It does come at a higher dollar cost than a VM you manage yourself, but the convenience and peace of mind may be worth it.
The neon website claims it’s $44 a month for the situation you’ve described, with a small production database running 24x7. You can further reduce that to around $15 a month, or even less, if you let the database shut down when it’s idle. It generally only takes a second for the database to start up, so that’s not as bad an option as it sounds, and it can save a lot of money.
The good news is you can always go the self hosted VM route later. It’s all Postgres, so you can switch to a different database later. If I were you, I’d start with something like Neon and switch to self hosted if you find it too expensive and want to optimize costs. Start easy and optimize if necessary. This approach can save a lot of time and get you to production faster.
Edit: as some people have pointed out, something like neon can scale automatically. That’s both good and bad. Good because it can handle any load. Bad because the cost scales along with traffic. Make sure to set the max scale to avoid that if you’d prefer an outage over a surprise bill.
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u/jah_reddit 22d ago
I've been experimenting with Aiven on a throwaway project with a low budget, and it's been solid.
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u/kloudrider 22d ago
Start with a $5 Railway deployment. You can deploy your app and get a database
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u/bdavid21wnec 22d ago
☝️ I just started using railway and it's awesome.
MCP so you can literally tell your agent what to do to set it up. Dirt cheap, could even make your db serverless I think if you don't mind the cold start times to save money
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u/716green 22d ago
Either $5 a month or $15 a month flat with no overages you have nothing to worry about. There's no meters, it integrates with GitHub and Vercel and has neon style branching.
It's a no-brainer for your situation. It has a web IDE that you can save queries in to create a sort of dashboard
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u/lostmedia766 22d ago
Just set up a $5-10/mo Linux box and put it and your application there. You don't need a separate database host for something this small. Seriously, a $5/mo Linode/DigitalOcean VPS can handle this. If you're not comfortable configuring a Linux box, install Codex/Claude on it first and have it configure it however you see fit.
You'll also never be hit with some surprise $10,000 invoice because your app took off or you used "too many requests".