Thanks for the clarifications, that's helpful.

I wouldn't call it pay-for-what-you-use unless the pricing varies with your actual usage instead of changing when you change plans.

Interesting point of view - it's certainly always a bit hard to find the right verbage that everyone can understand, but hopefully this discussion clarified things!

Last time I used a traditional hosting provider, I could get a new bare metal server setup in under half an hour. I would hardly call them "pay what you use" even though I could start and stop servers and change the plan I'm on and still be only two to three times slower than doing the same on AWS.

Certainly - I've been seeing a bunch of usage based pricing that price on a different metric (like metrics per second) etc.

Regardless, with Timescale Cloud, if you get a machine, you pay the price for that machine for as long as you use it. So I guess to avoid the confusion, we can call this just paying for the machine :)

By the way, I've recently started using TimescaleDB (past month or two) for processing cryptocurrency trading information and I'm liking it a lot so far. I love that I can use Postgres as normal, but have efficient time-based queries.

My first ever test query was to generate minutely OHLC+volume from time,price,quantity trades. It was pleasantly easy to do:

    select time_bucket('1 minutes', time) as minutely, 
           max(price) as high,
           min(price) as low,
           first(price, time) as open,
           last(price, time) as close,
           sum(quantity) as volume
      from trades
    group by minutely
    order by minutely;

https://gist.github.com/danielytics/e9b69933586e00732646e016...

Plus growing, shrinking, migrating only requires a few clicks

How do you do live migrations? Do you shard, then suspend existing queries, and finally redirect?

We spin up a separate instance that matches the type that you want to migrate to, restore a backup and stream the WAL logs. Then, we redirect.

The good ol' event sourcing trick :D