Suppose you move your database to a managed Postgres plan. Twenty-five dollars a month, no patching, a dashboard with a restore button. Compared to the VPS you were going to run yourself, it looks like the responsible choice.
Then you read the pricing page properly, all the way down, and find the line that changes the comparison: point-in-time recovery, billed at $100/month per 7 days of retention, on top of the plan.
That is not a hosting cost. That is a different product, priced like insurance, and it is the one thing a self-hosted pgBackRest gives you for the price of a cron job.
The comparison everyone makes
Prices read from the providers' own pages on 2026-10-29, before tax:
| Option | What it is | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud VPS-1 | 2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, daily backup | €4.49 |
| Supabase Pro | 8 GB disk, $10 compute credit covering one Micro instance | $25 |
| Supabase PITR add-on | 7-day retention | +$100 |
On RAM per euro, the VPS wins by roughly a factor of twenty. A Supabase Micro instance is 1 GB of RAM for $25. A 4 GB VPS is four euros and change.
So the easy conclusion is "managed is a rip-off". That conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong for a reason that has nothing to do with RAM.
What you are actually buying
Five things, none of which appear in the spec column:
- Backups someone else scheduled.
- Point-in-time recovery — if you pay the line above.
- Major-version upgrades someone else ran first.
- Failover, on the tiers that include it.
- A connection pooler in front of a database that does not enjoy thousands of connections.
If you can do 1 through 3 reliably, self-hosting wins on money and you should close this tab. If you cannot, the managed price is not hosting. It is insurance, and insuring a database is cheaper than losing one.
The calculation nobody does
Write your hourly rate down first. Then:
self-hosted = VPS + (hours of database work × your rate)
managed = plan + (hours of migration and plumbing × your rate)
A 4 GB VPS is €4.49. The managed plan is $25. The gap is about €20 a month — half an hour of a freelance rate. If self-hosting costs you more than thirty minutes a month in patching, backup checks and the occasional restore rehearsal, you are subsidising the server with your evenings.
That arithmetic flips at the first incident. An unrehearsed restore is not thirty minutes. It is a night, and sometimes a customer.
The one question that decides it
Not "which is cheaper". This one:
Have you restored from your own backup in the last 90 days, and did you time it?
If yes, self-hosting is a defensible engineering choice and you can stop paying for a dashboard.
If no, you do not currently have a backup strategy. You have a backup job whose success you have never verified, and the managed plan is the cheaper way to fix that today.
The full comparison, with the Neon per-CU maths, the migration path in both directions and the checklist I would run before choosing:
Managed PostgreSQL vs PostgreSQL on a VPS
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