> Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things

I appreciate there are indeed billions of people for whom $5 is a lot of money, but just how many of them are "students and enthusiasts" itching to get started with Postgres?

I realise that - perhaps particularly here - a $5/month VPS is a deeply unsexy thing. You can, however, achieve (and learn) an awful lot with one.

Nowadays there's a ton of idling compute capacity running client side that could be used to spin up a personal cloud environment with all core services if one has the proper knowledge. For anyone that has a core to spare and a few GB's of memory, which should be easy for most modrn midrange hardware, I would recommend they save that $5 paying for a third party VPS, go deploy an open source hypervisor such as KVM, and run the virtual server on your own hardware.

Who absolutely would not want to give a credit card to AWS where a bill is dynamic. If $5/mo is bad they definitely can’t handle the screw up that scales up and runs overnight for $500.

Free tier instances on various providers provides an option. And if you can't afford $5 a month you really shouldn't be playing with services where there's a risk of huge overages if you face a sudden spike in users.

You cannot sign up on AWS Free Tier without the credit card info and many students end up with a huge bill. This sub reddit.com/r/aws/ has many such posts.

Some links and discussions:

- https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-fre...

- https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371

Well, and that is just as much of an issue if you use most serverless offerings. But you're not prepared to carefully manage your use, cloud services should not even be on your radar.

Comparison of free tiers: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/