Guides
Guides to your product's infrastructure, with one flat bill.
What a flat price includes, how to leave a metered service, what runs on one dedicated machine, and how your app and its sign-in run there too. Every number on these pages is the pricing page's, so they stay true as the product changes.
The bill
What a flat price includes, and what a metered one hides.
Vercel + Supabase cost
What Vercel + Supabase really costs when your app gets traffic
Current Vercel and Supabase plan, seat, traffic and overage prices, compared with a flat-price dedicated machine.
Heroku alternative
A Heroku alternative when you want one machine and one flat price
Heroku dynos, Postgres and Key-Value priced side by side with one managed machine for app, database and sign-in, plus where Heroku is better.
Railway alternative
A Railway alternative when you want one machine and one number
An honest Railway comparison for small teams: per-second resource billing versus a managed dedicated machine with app, database and auth on one flat bill.
Render alternative
A Render alternative when separate services become separate bills
Compare Render web services, Postgres and Key Value with one managed dedicated machine, including current entry prices and the architectural tradeoffs.
Managed machine vs VPS cost
The VPS costs less. Your time is the second bill
A quotable cost and operations table for a self-managed VPS versus Lathe, with honest assumptions and the cases where DIY is the better choice.
Flat-price managed database
A managed database with a flat price you can compute
One dedicated paid machine, one monthly price from $15: storage, 20 TB of traffic, backups, TLS and the console included. Nothing metered.
No egress fees
Managed Postgres: traffic included, no metering
Every paid Lathe instance includes 20 TB of traffic a month at full speed. Pull backups, run exports, move your data out: traffic is included in the flat price.
Never paused, never metered
A database that never pauses and never meters
Paid plans: no idle sleep or usage meters. One dedicated machine that stays on for one price from $15.
A database for side projects
A database for side projects, with no surprises
One dedicated paid machine for all your small projects at $15 a month: never paused, never metered, storage and 20 TB of traffic included.
Moving off a metered service
Leaving Supabase, Neon or another Postgres provider, and the move itself.
Lathe vs Vercel + Supabase
Lathe vs Vercel + Supabase: which stack fits your app?
Compare Lathe with Vercel and Supabase on price, integrations and fit. See the one-machine limits and when separate platforms work better.
Vercel + Supabase alternative
We wanted a Vercel + Supabase alternative without becoming full-time DevOps
A founder-builder's honest guide to the tradeoffs between Vercel + Supabase, DIY self-hosting, and one managed dedicated machine.
Firebase alternative
A Firebase alternative when you want SQL and one flat price
Firebase's usage-based plans versus one machine with Postgres and sign-in at a flat price: what moves, what you give up, and who should stay.
Self-hosted Supabase
Self-hosting Supabase in production: what are you signing up to run?
Self-hosted Supabase gives you control, but also backups, upgrades and recovery. Compare that work with a managed app, Postgres and auth machine.
Supabase alternative
Supabase alternative: one machine, one flat bill
Your app, Postgres and sign-in on one dedicated machine, one flat price from $15 a month, no price per user. What changes, what you give up, and the move.
Move off Supabase, keep the client
Leave Supabase and keep supabase-js for sign-in
Move the Postgres and the sign-in to a dedicated machine at a flat price without rewriting the front end: supabase-js keeps working against the Auth engine.
PostgreSQL vs Supabase
PostgreSQL vs Supabase: what the difference is
Supabase is a platform built around PostgreSQL. What it adds, what is plain Postgres, and how to run the Postgres part alone from $15 a month.
Neon alternative
A Neon alternative that never scales to zero
Neon meters compute and scales to zero. Paid Lathe plans give you a dedicated Postgres machine, always on, from $15 flat. What changes and how to move.
Fly.io Postgres alternative
Fly.io Postgres alternative with one flat price
Fly.io Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month plus storage, with failover. Lathe is one Postgres machine from $15, storage included. The honest trade.
DigitalOcean Postgres alternative
DigitalOcean Managed Postgres alternative
DigitalOcean's smallest managed Postgres node is $15.15 for 1 GiB of memory, storage by the GiB. Lathe prices a whole machine instead. What each includes.
ElephantSQL alternative
ElephantSQL alternative: where to run Postgres now
ElephantSQL is discontinued. Lathe runs PostgreSQL 17 on a dedicated machine from $15 a month, flat. How to move, and when it is not the fit.
Moving a Postgres database
Move a Postgres database with pg_dump and pg_restore
Moving a PostgreSQL database between providers in three commands: dump, restore, switch the connection string. What to check, and how to keep downtime short.
The app and its sign-in
Your own containers and your users, on the same machine as the data.
Deploy from your AI agent
Give your AI agent a machine, not another dashboard
Copy-paste MCP setup for Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT, then create a machine, deploy an app and retrieve short-lived connection credentials.
App hosting beside the database
Host a container beside its Postgres, flat price
Put the image of your app on the dedicated machine that runs its database: deploy from a push, your domain, TLS, nothing metered. From $15 a month.
Sign-in without a price per user
Sign-in for your app with no price per user
Managed sign-in with the users in your own Postgres: email links, OAuth, MFA, sessions, in the flat plan price. Users are never a line on the bill.
How it runs
One dedicated machine, the engines on it, and the alternative of running it yourself.
Redis to Postgres
Redis to Postgres: the three patterns that actually get used
Cache-aside, queues and data moves between Redis 8 and PostgreSQL 17, with real commands and the decision criteria for one machine or two.
Self-hosted VPS or managed
Postgres on a cheap VPS, or the same box run for you
A VPS with Postgres on it is the right call until the night it stops answering. What self-hosting costs in hours, what Lathe does instead, and when each fits.
One machine, every engine
Postgres, Redis, NATS and S3 storage on one machine
Any mix of Postgres 17, Redis 8, CouchDB 3, NATS 2 and SeaweedFS 4 on one Lathe instance, each on its own TLS port with its own credentials and memory budget.
pgvector on your own machine
pgvector embeddings on a dedicated Postgres machine
Embeddings are big and cheap to rebuild. Run pgvector on a dedicated machine with storage and 20 TB of traffic included, from $15 a month. Nothing metered.
The engines
One page per engine: what runs, how to connect, how the app and its sign-in fit, what it costs.
Host your app beside its database
Host your app on the same machine as its database
Your container image on the dedicated machine that runs its databases: deployed from a push, served on your domain over TLS, nothing extra. From $15 a month.
Managed sign-in for your app
Sign-in on your own Postgres, no price per user
Email links and codes, OAuth, MFA and sessions for your app, with the users in your own Postgres on a dedicated machine. Nothing per user. From $15 a month.
Managed PostgreSQL 17
Managed PostgreSQL 17 on a dedicated machine
Paid PostgreSQL 17 with PgBouncer, TLS, pgvector and restore-tested daily backups on a dedicated machine you do not run. Flat price from $15 a month.
Managed Redis 8
Managed Redis 8 with TLS on a dedicated machine
Redis 8 with TLS, a password, a memory budget you set and a console in the portal, on the same dedicated machine as your database. Nothing metered.
Managed CouchDB 3
Managed CouchDB 3 on a dedicated machine
CouchDB 3 over HTTPS with admin credentials, Fauxton, replication and Mango queries on your own dedicated machine. Flat monthly price, nothing metered.
Managed NATS 2 with JetStream
Managed NATS 2 with JetStream on a dedicated machine
NATS 2 with JetStream persistent streams, TLS and credentials on the same dedicated machine as your database. Streams managed from the portal. Flat price.
S3-compatible object storage
S3-compatible object storage on a dedicated machine
Buckets over the S3 API with TLS and keys of your own, on the dedicated machine beside your database. Any S3 SDK, presigned URLs, flat price, nothing metered.
Written for a person; the same facts for an AI agent are on the agents page and at /llms.txt.
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