I've been using a Postgres DB on Railway's free plan (that is going away) and it was great. It did everything I wanted (excluding external access and PostGIS) for cents. The support community is nice.

I didn't use it for much more, but my experience has been great. They deserve way more air time than they currently get.

I wish digitalocean offered decent pricing for spaces (s3). Unfortunately it starts at 5$, which is an enormous price for storing 70 small images, but s3 would greatly simplify my server management moving state entirely outside the server (managed database + managed object storage)

You could use Cloudflare R2, it's pretty cheap overall.

I did not realize they have an s3 compatible service

> price for storing 70 small images

Do you have to use an object store in that case? Or does it have to be separate from whatever application instance?

I don't have to use an object store, but it makes the cost of setting up a server more expensive if I use the filesystem, if I delete the instance, the data is gone. A volume kinda offset this, but it's way less portable and accessible only by one instance at a time

The peace of mind of managed is nice, all I have to think about is running the app, without having to deal with making sure db and files don't get lost

At that level I think I'd just put the images in the database.

That's an option, but I want to keep things simple and the assumption is usually "filesystem" but weirdly most libraries assume S3 usage. I don't think I've seen native support for db-stored images in any of the libraries I use, which is sad but a reality.

Maybe not directly in libraries but there's a few programs to make a fuse filesystem backed by a database.

Ya cant just throw em at a blob type field/column?

In the git repo even

The images are supplied by the users, so that wouldn't be an option