Doing backups and validating backups is very error-prone and time consuming. To me this reads as: "If you do all the hard complex work yourself, what's making you nervous about it?"

It's far easier to do backups and database hosting at scale. Database failures are rare, so it's this one-off situation that you have to be prepared for. That requires clearly defined processes, clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and most importantly: feedback from unfortunate incidents that you can learn from. All that is very hard to accomplish when you do self-hosting.

It's actually probably a more difficult problem at scale.

When you have a single smallish schema, you export, restore, and write automated tests that'll probably prove that backups in 10 minutes ( runtime, development time few days / weeks ). Either the transaction runs or errors, and either the test passes or not.

The problem when small is obviously knowledge, skills, and procedures.

Things like:

- What if the monitoring that alerts me that the backups are down, is also actually down. - What do you mean it's no longer "safe" to kubectl delete pvc --all? - What do you mean there's nobody around with the skills to unfuck this? - What do you mean I actually have to respond to these alerts in a timely manner?

The reality is, when the database is small, it typically doesn't cost a whole lot, so there's a lack of incentive to really tool and skill for this when you can get a reasonable managed service.

I typically have those skills, but still use a managed service for my own startup because it's not worth my time.

Once the bill is a larger than TCO of self-hosting you have another discussion.

> Doing backups and validating backups is very error-prone and time consuming

Right, but regardless of using a managed database service or self-hosted database, this is something you probably are doing anyways, at least for a production service with real users. Sure, the managed service probably helps with you with the details of how the backup is made, where it's stored, and how the restore process happens, but you still need to validate your backups and the rest, so replicate that process/experience with your self-hosted setup and you're nearly there.