Open and portable Postgres-as-a-service. Also available on Hetzner
In this technical retrospective (2023), @padmanabhank shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 22 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
This looks amazing, well done. The pricing is very reasonable. (1) Seriously considering switching to this from my homebrew setup.
Extension support (pg vector) would be great.
(1) Looking at https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/about/pricing ↗ but your pricing on the landing page is almost 3 times higher https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql ↗
This looks great!
Some questions:
“ Select from 2 to 32 vCPUs; 8 GB - 64 GB RAM; 128 GB - 1 TB disk” how easy or fiddly is it for the end user to change specs? Are we responsible for migration?
Also, we can have as many databases as we want on our instance? Or just one?
Reiterating jpg’s question, does it have pgvector support?
What are your recommendations for connecting it to file store and/or blob store?
Do you have any support for backups?
Perhaps there is documention I missed, I read also the product and pricing pages.
Looks great. It would be useful to have a wiki page about the Elastic V2 license. e.g https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq ↗ FYI the first link to your license is broken on this page: https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/about/terms-of-service ↗
nice. big diff seems to be cost. Could be useful for analytics workloads, i.e. read replicas.
https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/managed-postgresql/price-performance ↗
Would be nice to see copy-and-paste instructions for setting up read replicas from RDS etc.
Interesting play on words to only call this “open”, heavily implying that it’s open source (by pointing at “closed source” competition) when in fact Elastic v2 is not open source. Hard pass.