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Life & fun · July 7, 2026

PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types

Hey! I'm Andrei. I got frustrated by how people tend to build overcomplicated backend systems, being "motivated" by big tech case studies and popular books. So, I started exploring lean architecture, and building my digital garden of ideas, approaches and data that align with this direction. Here I want to present one of the tools – Sizing tool for PostgreSQL. I've benchmarked PostgreSQL on different EC2 instances and disks, with different initial data sets to see performance that these instances can give you. And I've built a tool to visualize this data, which I welcome you to explore. So,…

PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types launched on July 7, 2026 with 97 votes, #439 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.

Visit postgres.saneengineer.com ↗Alternativestop 2% of July 2026

In plain words

This tool helps developers choose the most cost-efficient AWS EC2 instance for PostgreSQL databases by visualizing performance benchmarks across 23 instance types and different disk configurations. Users input parameters like required requests-per-second and disk size to find optimal sizing recommendations. It's designed for engineers building simpler backend systems who want data-driven instance selection instead of over-provisioning based on industry case studies.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Find the cheapest AWS EC2 instance that clears your PostgreSQL throughput target — real benchmarks of 26 instance types across 8 families.

Choose how big your data is and how much throughput you need. Each point is a benchmarked instance × disk; everything right of the target line clears your requirement, and the cheapest of those is the pick. 30 of 52 configs clear 33,000 RPS at 1 GB. The cheapest is m8g.large on gp3-baseline at $ 82 /mo . Points are instance × disk; the dashed line is the cost/performance frontier; arm64 (Graviton) is green, x86-64from postgres.saneengineer.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey! I'm Andrei. I got frustrated by how people tend to build overcomplicated backend systems, being "motivated" by big tech case studies and popular books. So, I started exploring lean architecture, and building my digital garden of ideas, approaches and data that align with this direction. Here I want to present…

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