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Comment by thomasfromcdnjs

9 months ago

Does mid six figure mean ~$500k?

That sounds insane for a crud app with one million users.

What am I missing?

I’ve seen startups with a thousand active users paying $50k/month (though that’s overall costs, not just db). It’s really easy to waste a lot of money doing nothing.

  • It’s especially easy to waste money on databases.

    People just throw more compute power (ie money) at performance problems, rather than fixing their queries or making better use of indices.

    • You can see this in the article here, where they are just using whatever garbage queries Prisma spits out.

      I’ve contended for a long time that ORMs and their ilk automatically building queries is an antipattern for anything but small data scale. At any reasonable size of db, you’re going to need to know sql well enough to write optimized queries anyway. There’s essential complexity in the DB queries, which ORMs can only hide for so long.

  • As a small business owner — I recently spent an hour canceling things that just added up over time and that I don’t now need. It’s just so easy to waste money, period.

    Directly to your point though, I once encountered a salesperson who was running an entire sandbox environment of a very large platform to the tune of about $25k/mo. It sat idle for almost half a year before someone came knocking. The cloud team did an audit and they were a little spicy about it, understandably.

$500k for only 100 millions rows db also sounds crazy

  • The largest table was 100 million rows. They could have had hundreds more tables.

    • Also curious why every comment mentions just the number of rows as the only factor that matters. A 100M rows table of 3 integer columns is quite different from 50+ columns, 5 of which are text up to a few MB long.

I bet it is cost of query processing (CPU) and traffic (network throughput) plus ofc provider markup.