The person I replied to said they wanted an open-source reimplementation of Aurora. My point - which was probably poorly-worded, or just implied - was that there's a lot of work that goes into something like that, and if you can't put the pieces together on your own, you probably shouldn't be running it for anything you can't afford downtime on.

Managed services have a clear value proposition. I personally think they're grossly overpriced, but I understand the appeal. Asking for that experience but also free / cheap doesn't make any sense.