Not trolling, I genuinely think it's a lot of money for a simple database though. Maybe yours isn't, but I don't know any provider that charges less than 300 for a hosted db.
no database is 'simple'. it really depends on the use case, doesn't it?
"going a long way" on sqlite would have really end up biting me in the ass as soon as my app needed to scale beyond it. now i've written a bunch of sqlite specific queries (ex: show me all the rows that were modified over 10 minutes ago) that i'd need to spend time migrating and testing on another database.
in my case, i had no idea what the actual load on my database was going to be. i knew i'd be sending it a constant stream of traffic and the traffic would grow over time, but until i did that, there was no (easy) way to load test it.
i started with the $7/mo option and when i grew out of that, a couple clicks later i was onto the $13/mo option. unloading the points i outlined above from my concerns allowed me to focus on building features instead of infrastructure.
it is all about perspective and approaching things in a way that is logical, not thinking in terms of the latest HN headlines. this app is the backend for something generating many millions of dollars a year in revenue. $300/mo is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Let's say you have a hobby or open source website that requires a database backend and isn't making money. $300 / year is quite expensive all of a sudden.
Indeed and that is why there are plenty of options for free tiers. I even started off with the $84/yr option, which isn't too bad.
I've lost the point of your message though. Your original response suggested a RPI... which is about $35 just for the base hardware and it doesn't do nearly what I outlined above.
