Thread by @simonw

What are the options for "serverless" PostgreSQL like these days? My definition of serverless here is that you don't have to spend any money at all if you're not getting any DB traffic, and cost then scales up as the traffic and storage you are using increases

Aurora PostgreSQL is the most obvious option, though it's not clear to me if you have to keep at least one instance running for it or if it fully "scales to zero" for projects that aren't receiving any traffic at all

Consensus in replies seems to be that this doesn't actually exist yet - scale-to-zero for a relational database server like PostgreSQL is evidently a whole lot harder than scale-to-zero for a stateless web application server as seen with things like Google Cloud Run

I'm also interested in PostgreSQL that starts cheap and magically scales - if I can spend $5/month on a database for a tiny project and spend more money if I need it to handle more data and traffic (without any interruption in service) that would be cool too

supabase.io/pricing isn't exactly scale-to-zero but they do offer a free 500MB PostgreSQL which is "Paused after 1 week inactivity" - not clear what unpausing looks like, and the next tier up from free is $25/month so not the pay-for-what-you-use I'm looking for

Most promising option looks to be Aurora Serverless v2, currently in preview - appears to scale to zero when not in use, but pricing hasn't been announced yet plus the preview at the moment is for MySQL compatible, the PostgreSQL compatible one will presumably come later