Pricing differs on Timescale Cloud based on the cloud & region to reflect variances of the underlying costs of running infrastructure on those regions.
Azure Postgres and AWS RDS do _not_ include HA replication in their base price -- you need to pay extra for actual replicas. What they do provide is the fact that they use decoupled storage to automatically recreate the database in the case of failure (which we do as well).
But that's not the same thing as ~zero downtime from migrating to a synchronous replica, which you can also use for scaling read queries.
I realise the HA solution included with Azure doesn't have replication, but it does provide a 99.99% SLA and suggests any downtime would be in the order of seconds. This is done, as you say, by recreating the database on a new node, but they have nodes standing by and ready. For a lot of use cases, that is good enough, with read-only replicas useful at an extra cost for scaling reads.
My point is that TimescaleDB's pricing is high enough that I'd expect replication to be provided, or at least some other kind of HA guarantee.
I haven't done experiments to measure downtime on Azure myself. SLAs are tricky once you dig very closely into the details. If I recall correctly, years ago when Google Cloud came out that they defined "uptime" as "responding at least once within a 10 minute period", so that a service that's online for 1 minute, then is offline for the next 9 minutes...is still considered to have 100% availability from an SLA perspective.
Moreover, your actual costs from the cloud vendors is often tricky and muddled, given they have some many different ways to charge you. For managed databases, this often includes things like some backup storage costs, bandwidth costs for ingress/egress, etc. All of that is "included" in our flat pricing.
But the biggest thing: Timescale Cloud is not offering an undifferentiated Postgres offering. It's the only place to get the best version of TimescaleDB.
And in many cases, this will /save/ you money. For example, TimescaleDB's native compression typically gets 94% bandwidth reduction. So the 500GB on Timescale Cloud is equivalent to paying for 8TB on Azure or AWS. And without all the other TimescaleDB features, including performance improvements of executing queries against compressed data.
I actually think this is a false comparison. With TimescaleDB you get higher inserts, 1000x faster queries (depending on your query, of course), 95% storage savings from native compression, etc., than with vanilla Postgres.
You also get really useful features like continuous aggregates, data retention policies, interpolation, etc.
So the comparison isn't really 1-to-1. Depending on your workload, you could easily get better performance out of 1 vCPU on Timescale Cloud than 4 vCPU on any vanilla Postgres service (not to mention the 95% cost savings on storage).
You're preaching to the converted on TimescaleDB's features - I love it.
I think it makes no sense to compare your managed offering to vanilla Postgres though - surely the comparison is vs TimescaleDB hosted in other ways.
In theory I can use TimescaleDB on cloud managed DBs already (if providers didn't offer such old versions of TimescaleDB).
Given your offering deploys to cloud VMs, perhaps the best comparison is vs deploying Postgres with TimescaleDB yourself on cloud VMs. And at a glance, it looks like your Basic tier is 300-400% more than the cloud VM - so what's the value-add? You get PITR, but beyond that?
Other cloud providers can only offer the Apache-2 version of TimescaleDB. So you wouldn't get native compression, continuous aggregates, downsampling, etc.
So again, the value add in Timescale Cloud are those features (all of which took a long time to build!). Also: we fully manage the database, are responsible for keeping it online, are available for support via email and Slack, etc.
The only real alternative to Timescale Cloud is to run it yourself, where you get the features but not the services/support. But you are welcome to do that if you'd like :-).
> Other cloud providers can only offer the Apache-2 version of TimescaleDB. So you wouldn't get native compression, continuous aggregates, downsampling, etc.
Ah yes - I was forgetting that!
> So again, the value add in Timescale Cloud are those features
Hmm, not really; those are the value-add from TimescaleDB itself, not Timescale Cloud.
I guess I'm going to remain unconvinced for now, but I really hope that, with time, the Timescale Cloud team works on adding more value vs self-hosting, as personally I don't think it brings enough value to justify the pricing as-is.
Azure Postgres and AWS RDS do _not_ include HA replication in their base price -- you need to pay extra for actual replicas. What they do provide is the fact that they use decoupled storage to automatically recreate the database in the case of failure (which we do as well).
But that's not the same thing as ~zero downtime from migrating to a synchronous replica, which you can also use for scaling read queries.