The managed-database markup
is optional.
MongoDB Atlas, AWS RDS, Confluent Cloud, ClickHouse Cloud and the rest are convenient — but you pay 2–4× the raw infrastructure cost for the convenience. DBHelm replaces most of the operational work those platforms do for you, so you can run your own databases on your own cloud and keep the difference.
Honest scope. This page is a scenario calculator built from public on-demand pricing in April 2026. It's not a measurement of your bill. For per-cluster monthly + annual estimates of your fleet (rate-card based, no extra cloud creds needed; full-fleet aware as of v1.25 and per-table attributable as of v1.26), use the in-app Cost dashboard. Live billing-puller integration (AWS Cost Explorer / GCP Billing / Azure Cost Management) is on the roadmap.
MongoDB
MongoDB — 3-node replica set
16 GB RAM per node · 100 GB data · HA
Typical production MongoDB for a B2B SaaS serving low-hundreds of req/s.
$5,412 saved per year
- 3× r6i.large (2 vCPU / 16 GB) $276/mo
- 3× 100 GB gp3 storage $24/mo
Postgres
Postgres — HA cluster
Primary + 2 replicas · 32 GB RAM per node · 500 GB data
Primary OLTP database for a mid-sized SaaS with realistic read replicas and WAL archive.
$5,136 saved per year
- 3× r6i.xlarge (4 vCPU / 32 GB) $552/mo
- 3× 500 GB gp3 storage $120/mo
Kafka
Kafka — 3-broker streaming cluster
8 vCPU / 32 GB per broker · 500 GB of logs · ~100 MB/s ingress
Event backbone for an application doing CDC + click-stream + service events.
$8,280 saved per year
- 3× m6i.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB) $840/mo
- 3× 500 GB gp3 + IOPS $60/mo
Redis
Redis — 3-node HA cache
16 GB RAM per node · primary + 2 replicas · HA with auto-failover
Session store + rate-limit + caching layer behind a high-traffic API.
$2,628 saved per year
- 3× r6i.large (2 vCPU / 16 GB) $276/mo
ClickHouse
ClickHouse — analytics cluster
3 shards × 1 replica · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 2 TB compressed
Product analytics, observability metrics, ad-hoc OLAP for a data team.
$6,360 saved per year
- 3× m6i.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB) $840/mo
- 3× 2 TB gp3 storage $480/mo
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch — logs cluster
3 data nodes · 32 GB heap · 2 TB hot storage
Log aggregation + search across ~10 engineering teams.
$5,856 saved per year
- 3× r6i.xlarge (4 vCPU / 32 GB) $552/mo
- 3× 2 TB gp3 storage $480/mo
Why the markup exists
You're not paying for the database.
You're paying for the ops work.
A managed-DB vendor's job is to make a database feel like a URL. To do that they absorb the work of monitoring, backups, upgrades, failovers, right-sizing, and on-call. DBHelm absorbs the same work — without charging per GB.
Auto-discovery
Every Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, StarRocks, Weaviate and more across every namespace — in seconds. No manifests to maintain.
Real-time monitoring
Engine-native metrics via the K8s pod-proxy. Slow queries, replication lag, cache hit rate, WAL growth, Kafka lag — all built in.
Automated backups + restore
Scheduled backups, point-in-time restore, cross-cluster clone, all from the UI. No Velero YAML to write.
Disaster recovery testing
RPO / RTO scores, backup freshness checks, failover simulation — proactive, not just reactive.
Right-sizing advisor
Finds over-provisioned workloads and quantifies the monthly dollar waste. The managed alternative: just pay more.
Incident playbooks
Built-in runbooks for high CPU, replication lag, disk pressure, connection exhaustion, slow queries. First-minute triage.
Capacity forecasting
Linear-regression projections for storage, memory, and connections — catch the next outage before it hits.
Compliance engine
Policy rules evaluated across your whole fleet, with pass/fail reports — replaces the compliance reports managed vendors upsell.
Upgrade Advisor
EOL detection, compatibility checks, breaking-change surfacing. Everything you'd pay Atlas Professional Services to do.
You bring a K8s cluster and a credit card for the compute.
DBHelm brings everything the managed vendor would do on top.
Methodology
How we got the numbers
Every managed-service price on this page is a publicly-listed on-demand rate, us-east-1 / aws-default / equivalent cheapest region, as of April 2026. We didn't cherry-pick — we picked the plan closest to the workload column on the left of each card. Links to the source pricing pages are below.
Self-managed costs use AWS EC2 on-demand + gp3 storage as the reference, because it's the easiest for readers to verify. GKE and AKS are within a few percent; reserved instances and spot cut the infrastructure bill further but not the managed-DB bill.
We do not include the cost of your time or the cost of running a K8s cluster itself. A shared cluster you already run for apps adds ~$150/mo of control-plane overhead that would be amortised across dozens of workloads. Even adding it in full to every scenario still leaves the savings intact.
We also do not include data-transfer / egress charges, which are typically another 10–25% on managed services and ~0% on a same-VPC self-hosted setup.
Keep your databases. Keep the money.
DBHelm runs 100% offline and works with every major database on Kubernetes, VMs, or direct-connect URLs. Free to connect & monitor; DBHelm Platform adds the operate layer at a fraction of managed-service pricing.