I understand that it becomes very hard to monetize if you're not able to offer your own hosted service, and I don't have a solution for that, but not supporting RDS is going to really diminish the product for many people.
Of course if you are 100% attached to AWS RDS itself (rather than the convenience of AWS RDS, which is replicable by ParadeDB), then there's not much we can do here, as we also need to eat :')
We are using Scaleway (french cloud) which is heaven when it comes to GDPR and Schrems compliance, but once we grow out of their managed db offerings or if we want something their managed db offering does not provide we are out of luck.
Been looking for a year more or less now and I am simply unable to find something that doesnt amount to us just paying a fraction of a consulting FTE to be our lightweight DBA. There are only so many ways you can set up postgres HA, it is amazing that no one has made a product out of doing it for someone else yet.
In the meantime, you can self-host ParadeDB on Scaleway directly by running the Docker container. Hope this helps!
Also, it would be possible to set up a logical PG replica.
I don't really know much about Solr but just started using it while helping with a project for openlibrary.org and it seems pretty alright but I'm still not totally sure I understand what makes it popular.
pg_bm25 is our first step in building an Elasticsearch alternative on Postgres. We built it as a result of working on hybrid search in Postgres and becoming frustrated with Postgres' sparse feature set when it comes to full text search.
To address a few of the discussion points, today pg_bm25 can be installed on self-hosted Postgres instances. Managed Postgres providers like RDS are pretty restrictive when it comes to the Postgres extension ecosystem, which is why we're currently working on a managed Postgres database called ParadeDB which comes with pg_bm25 preinstalled. It'll be available in private beta next week and there's a waitlist on our website (https://www.paradedb.com/).