OK, but how much time are you spending on managing these yourself? If it's non-zero then the cost between $5 and $120 for a company is trivial. For a personal side project, sure, but if we are talking about paying customers' data then even things like automated backup and recovery need to be taken into account.
For backups I agree, they obviously should be automated, but recovery? Not in my experience, not at the scale we're talking about here. You want something that is simple and semi-automated.
Backup recovery in a small, simple, robust system is very rare. Automated recovery is complex and there are quite a bunch of gotchas and perhaps project specific things to take into account.
But automated backups are typically straightforward. You need to know when and how to do them and where to put them.
I think there are tons of reasons to pay for an managed database if you need it. But it is not a baseline requirement for many projects.
Backup is automated on a nightly cron.
Restoring the entire DB is easy, I have a script to do it.
But ya if something blows up in prod or partially blows up, ... usually the situation is you wrote some shoddy script and blew up half the database so then you have to import it somewhere else and untangle that mess. So you're quite right, can't easily be automated.
It's required very little maintenance so far, and it may even be a positive ROI because I'm using the same setup for development. Since it's part of the same Kubernetes config, it's easy to spin up the DB under Docker Desktop for home development. I don't know how I'd do that with a managed solution.
