> this decision alone will more than pay for itself over the long run

To be fair , it's well know that GCloud is way more friendlier for small teams than AWS.

That said it lack some services that are widely popular on AWS ( SNS , Cognito , SES...).

You don't need a $350K/year worked-at-Netflix guru to set up 2 or 3 PostgreSQL or MySQL boxes in separate datacenters and ship transaction logs around.

I think many people over-estimate by a huge factor, how tough it is to run and maintain things. The cloud providers of course, love this!

You are correct. For this system, we didn't go that route because of the amount of data involved, and the rate at which data are ingested, are both large enough to make maintaining our own fleet of database servers operationally challenging.

We have a small, experienced team with a lot of operational experience, so we know how we could build this with other technologies and how to maintain it (And how much time it would take). All of that would be time away from actually building the product, and it would also change some of the character of what is expected for the job.

We have worked at some of the larger bay area companies, and there are some really nice aspects of those jobs. One of them is having a strong enough operational base so that you can concentrate on planning and building a thing, instead of always being caught in a reactionary loop.

Postgres is always going to have a special place in my heart, and we do use it as well, we are just careful to use it in operational ways that won't ruin our weekends. If this feature were the one core thing that made Streak special, we likely would have built it with Postgres and Citus, but it is just one of many features, and going with Spanner let's us treat it that way.

The same applies for any (well-) managed platform (e.g. Heroku).

Agree, but you also pay through the nose for Spanner.