# Amazon RDS Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds/ 44 people recommended Amazon RDS in Hacker News comments, 11 had mixed feelings and 48 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 12 months, in 32 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Slightly more people criticize it than recommend it. Managed Postgres and MySQL database that handles backups, replicas and upgrades so you don't run it yourself. Critics say it costs far more than renting a server and is slower. Summary written by Claude from the comments below. ## What people warn about - Costs more than self-hosting (6 comments in the sample): "a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337487)) "the price difference between the bare machines vs RDS usually aren't enough to pay for another person" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086717)) "A UNIX pipe gets replaced with a $1200/mo. maximum IOPS RDS channel, bandwidth not included in price." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973990)) - Outages, bugs and upgrade surprises (3 comments in the sample): "Strangely, what version I needed to upgrade to from 8.0 was not stated anywhere in the mass of emails Amazon sent me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131796)) "I've had an RDS instance fail in an equally-weird way that required manual AWS operator intervention 24 hours later" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597644)) "they killed a postgres on RDS instance (AWS bug!) and couldn't google or LLM their way out of it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054652)) - Limits on query performance and IO (2 comments in the sample): "If you’re on AWS the answer is fairly simple because it boils down to what IO capacity you are willing to pay for." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46894918)) "We run ~25kqps average & mostly things are fine, but when on-call pages come in query performance is a common culprit." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365430)) - Less visibility and control (2 comments in the sample): "except now they are stuck trying to maintain and debug Postgres without having the same visibility and agency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337393)) "why not allow RDS to load up extension binaries from an S3 bucket and call it a day?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446324)) ## Why people recommend it - Managed backups and point-in-time recovery (5 comments in the sample): "it adds a lot of value - scalability, a reasonably optimized config, backups I don’t have to worry about." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083860)) "battle-tested infrastructure for HA, backup and restores, point-in-time recovery, read replicas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009624)) "The first step I do when I do any meaningful side project is to set up rds with snapshots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145042)) - Saves time on upkeep and ops (4 comments in the sample): "db hosting is something that makes me nervous and I end up just leaving it to RDS etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024789)) "I do not want that responsibility, especially because I know how badly it turns out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341812)) "RDS is doing a lot more for you than what you can set up in an afternoon" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031226)) - Integrates with other AWS services (4 comments in the sample): "RDS gets you easy integration with the rest of the AWS services, which as a startup, you’re probably using quite a few of." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016004)) "I concur on RDS, Terraform for IAC, and FaaS whenever possible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082117)) "Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449248)) - Easy high availability and scaling (3 comments in the sample): "read auto scaling is huge in Serverless: you can have new read replica nodes auto-launch in response to e.g…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337725)) "Multi-AZ RDS is 100% higher availability than me managing something." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973084)) "Easy to scale on RDS, along with everything else." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641878)) ## Other managed databases people recommend - [Neon Postgres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neon/): 31 recommend, 8 mixed, 9 criticize - [DynamoDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-dynamodb/): 28 recommend, 14 mixed, 29 criticize - [PlanetScale](https://hackerapproved.com/p/planetscale/): 25 recommend, 6 mixed, 27 criticize - [Cloudflare D1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-d1/): 25 recommend, 6 mixed, 27 criticize ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/) ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon RDS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds/ (44 recommend, 11 mixed, 48 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.