It runs easily on a vps at your scale, even the same vps serving your app. That used to mean having a modicum of sysadmin knowhow but it’s straightforward these days, especially if you just use a premade docker file.

I run pgautofailover with 2 replicas and 1 monitor, you can run 2 replicas on equal configuration, though i size primary bigger and monitor node is tiny.

You can run this on $10x2 = $20 per month setup for 2 replicas and 1 monitor node for maybe $2-3.

For most other projects i just use sqlite, backup periodically to s3.

some report (coincidentally i was checking health of my small cluster for an app)

Common application queries average under 4 ms:frequent analytics queries: ~0.9–1.4 ms average common inserts: ~0.4–3.4 ms average the slower recurring reporting query: 62 ms average across 53 calls, 308 ms worst case

Query volume is approximately 2.30 million SQL statements/day (~26.6 statements/sec), based on pg_stat_statements over the last 97.3 days. That includes every SQL statement, not just user-facing requests: BEGIN/COMMIT alone account for ~1.05M/day, analytics inserts for ~522K/day, and HA/monitoring checks for ~118K/day.

The $10 VPS that serves your web app can run Postgres just fine. If it can’t? Fire up another $10 VPS. Learn how to tune your configs and network settings and query/cache efficiently.

Until you need to scale up it's perfectly acceptable to just run postgres on the same instance as the logic that's executing. It's not a great strategy in the long run due to all your eggs being in one basket and the need to configure things like backups manually but it'll save buckets of money compared to going with something prerolled by AWS while the functionality it'd give you wouldn't be noticeable.