It's not about it being hard, it's about delegating. Many companies are a bit less sensitive to pricing and would rather pay monthly for someone else to keep their database up, rather than spending engineering hours on setting up a database, tuning it, updating it, checking its backups, monitoring it and making it scale if needed.

Sure, any regular SME can just install Postgres or MySQL without even setting much up except with `mysql_secure_install`, a user with a password and an 'app' database. But you may end up with 10-20 database installs you need to back up, patch and so on every once in a while. And companies value that.

On the pricing bit, I have to say edge driven SQLite/ libsql driven solutions (this is a lot of them) can be a mixed bag.

Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage.

AWS with Aurora is more expensive for sure and isn’t edge located if I recall correctly, so you don’t get near instant propagation of changes on the edge

The bigger thing for me is how much control you have. So far with these edge database providers you don’t have a ton of say in how things are structured. To use them optimally, I have found it works best if you are doing database-per-tenant (or customer) scenarios or using it as a read / write cache that gets exfiltrated asynchronously.

And that is where I believe the real cost factors come into play is the flexibility

Or at least they should. I’ve worked many places where thousands of dollars in engineering hours were wasted on something after they refused to use a service for a fraction of the cost. Some companies understand this but others don’t.