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.
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.