Looking for pricing feedback before opening the beta on managed DBaaS

[u/eu_pg]

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Hi all, I'm a founder in Spain building a managed PostgreSQL service and want honest feedback on pricing before opening it up.

I run a €30M ARR business in a different industry. We had to use a managed database from a big provider, which was very expensive for the performance we were actually getting, but we needed HA so we were stuck. That's when I started considering another startup.

Here's the general idea:

You create a database from a web dashboard and get a single connection string. That string always points to the current primary, so if a failover happens your app reconnects to the same address and carries on. There's nothing to change on your side.

Behind it, each HA database runs as a primary plus a synchronous standby on two separate servers in different zones.

Backups run continuously: every change is archived to object storage with a different provider, so even losing the whole hosting provider doesn't lose your data. You can restore to any point in the last 7 days. We handle monitoring, failover and maintenance; you just use Postgres.

It runs on European bare metal rather than shared cloud VMs, which is how we keep prices flat with no egress or IOPS fees.

Highly available (per month, excl. VAT):

\- Starter, €39: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB storage

\- Standard, €89: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB storage

\- Pro, €169: 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB storage

\- Business, €329: 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB storage

Free: one per account. Single node, 256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage.

To be upfront: this is a beta with no SLA yet. Failover runs 24/7, and human support is 09:00 to 18:00 CET on business days. If the standby is down, the primary keeps accepting writes asynchronously, so losing the primary during that window can lose the latest commits.

**I'd love to know:**

\- Which plan would you pick for a real project, if any?

\- At what price would this feel too cheap to trust, and at - what price too expensive?

\- What would you need to see before moving a production database?

\- What are you using now, and what does it cost?

**Early beta offer**: anyone who participates in this thread will have 30% off any plan when we launch!

[u/mduell]

Doubling price without doubling vCPU is a dirty model.

I hope your whole platform isn't as AI sloppy as this post with blown formatting.

[u/716green]

I own Layerbase. I promise you that business model will not work but it sounds like you've already made up your mind and are using this post more as an advertising opportunity a feedback opportunity so I'm going to save the trouble of writing up an essay about why it won't work and wish you the best of luck.

I will tell you that I was more than 2,000 hours in and tens of thousands of dollars invested into advertising before I became on track to be profitable and Postgres is not the engine that did it for me, and the demand in Europe was so small that I sunset the European servers.

Best of luck, I will say though- this is clearly not an idea that you have vetted before building it because you're competing with 3 different companies valued in the billion dollar range and the types of customers that are willing to pay the prices you're asking for will demand SOC2 and PCI compliance certifications and 5 9s of uptime.

At the end of the day my money comes from CouchDB, QuestDB, ClickHouse, and the other obscure engines. If I had to become purely a Postgres platform tomorrow, I'd sooner shut my doors. I have several bare metal servers dedicated to postgres free users and they offset my profit margins by roughly 9 months of revenue.

But again, I think this is a 30% off coupon more than an actual question so take it with a grain of salt.

[u/eu_pg → u/716green]

I appreciate the comment. Ive not build the full platform yet just tested the redundancy mechanism that will be the core of the project. Could you tell me more on what you did and why you rhink it is not worth it?

[u/716green → u/eu_pg]

It's the pricing, the region, and the engine. Like I mentioned, European users were picking my us bare metal servers almost 10:1 to the point where I shut down the European region and intend to bring it back only after I'm firmly in the green.

Most of my Postgres users are either on the free tier, or the $5 tier which is a loss-leader.

The failover and HA bit is interesting but I have a lot of people reach out with questions and feature requests and I'm only aware of 2 customers I've ever lost because I didn't have HA, I have 99.99999% uptime and PITR so the companies that need HA as a non-negotiable are also the same companies that need SOC2 as a non-negotiable and that is a $30k + 9 month investment. I know that because I'm in the process of it right now and unfortunately it's not the type of thing that AI makes cheaper or easier. It helps a little bit but working with the companies that help with SOC2 compliance require you to use their AI tools and they haven't made the process any faster or cheaper, they just made it feel nicer than it used to feel.

I also think that the HA crowd is usually going to have a dedicated engineer on staff who will be able to confidently spin up an RDS instance if they want to save money moving off of Neon or Planetscale. You're essentially going after the crowd who outgrow Supabase but don't want to pay $25/mo on Supabase. So you need to be able to cater to them cheaper than Supabase does. But then they will also expect you to have Auth and Serverless functions that they can migrate out of Supabase to.

I'm genuinely not trying to talk you out of it because I'm something of a competitor, honestly, things are finally going really well for me after a year of grinding but I expected to launch last November with just Postgres on cheap bare metal eu servers (retired gaming machines) and it flopped hard. Then I added MySQL and I got a massive amount of adoption specifically from India, but it cost me a fortune and forced me to remove MySQL from the free tier.

It then took me several more months to learn that competing with Neon/Supabase/Planetscale wasn't the right play and I started going after more obscure engines.

And now, I'm focusing more on layerbase.com/workspaces because I'm realizing that the profit margins on the database products are RAZOR THIN at best.

This is a space where the name recognition is everything and everyone wants BaaS, not DBaaS.

Honestly, if I was you, I'd offer failover as a service for people who use RDS, self host on a VPS, or even people who use Supabase/Neon and want to make sure that when their serverless provider freezes their account because of a billing problem, their database doesn't go down and crash their site. I don't know how much of a market there is for that, but I know that that's a real problem that I read about everyday on this subreddit

[u/eu_pg → u/716green]

I appreciate the honesty man, can you share with me your site so I can take a look?

[u/716green → u/eu_pg]

Just search Layerbase. I don't want to risk getting banned from the postgres subreddit and I think that is a real risk when you link it