Database Chooser

Pick the right database type — with real prices where we have them.

Six questions. We will tell you when a $0 SQLite file beats a $70/mo RDS instance.

1. What shape is most of your data?

Tables, foreign keys, joins — classic relationalKeys and values — sessions, flags, countersJSON documents that rarely look alikeEvents, metrics, time-series — scan billions of rowsEmbeddings for search / RAG

2. Roughly how big will this get in the next year?

Personal / side project — thousands of rows, low trafficSmall product — up to ~1M rows or a few thousand DAUGrowing SaaS — tens of millions of rows or ~100k DAULarge scale — 100M+ rows, heavy analytics, or global traffic

3. What does your read/write pattern look like?

Mostly reads — cache-friendly, dashboards, contentSteady writes — logs, ingestion, user-generated contentBalanced OLTP — typical CRUD appEphemeral — TTL keys, cache, rate limits

4. Where do users (and writers) need to be?

One region is fine — I can pick a datacenterMulti-region reads — latency matters, one primary writerEdge / global — Workers, low latency everywhereNot sure yet — one app server is fine for now

5. How much database ops do you want to own?

Zero — managed only, no patching, no backups on meSome — I can run migrations and read dashboardsI will SSH in — VPS, backups, and systemd are fineVendor SLA — I pay so someone else gets paged

6. What is your monthly database budget?

$0 — free tier or a file on diskUnder ~$20/moUnder ~$100/moBudget is not the bottleneck