Yeah, I think keeping infra simple is the way to go too. You can micro-optimize a lot of things, but this doesn’t really beat the simplicity of just running SQLite, or Postgres, or maybe Postgres + one specialized DB (like ClickHouse if you need OLAP).

S3 is pretty helpful though even on self-hosted instances (e.g. you can offload storage to a cheap R2/B2 that way, or put user uploads behind a CDN, or make it easier to move stuff from one cloud to another etc). Maybe consider an env variable instead of an #ifdef?