> 10 years ago I spent 10x+ per month for 32GB (RAM) Heroku Postgres instances, IIRC they were around $400/mo, maybe even more.

Aren't you comparing RAM vs Storage there? The pricing chart here says nothing about RAM.

Heroku product here: the Essential 0 and 1 plans replace the older row-limited Heroku Postgres mini/basic plans at the same price points but better perf in a lot of scenarios and a storage instead of row limit - forcing people to denormalize for row count wasn't ideal under old mini/basic limits. The Essential-2 plan is a new option for a larger pre-prod/test/small-scale DB option above what we offered before.

We're expanding the Aurora-backed offerings to include larger dedicated DBs in the relatively near future as well.

Gail Frederick our CTO talked a bit more about it at high-level during re:Invent 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZLcv7rwj7Y&t=1955s

Why did I think you were leading the Apex product team?

I was for quite a few years - moved to Heroku in Q3 last year for an interesting opportunity. Apex is in good hands with Daniel Ballinger (and I stay in touch with a bunch of team if that helps).

These "Essential" tiers are bare bones instances for toys/mvps, they're much different than the bigger ones. No replication, 99.5% uptime target, no maintenance windows etc.

That's 750$/month now, I think: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql#pricing (Standard 4)

I'm curious how the Essential plans work, given that Aurora pricing starts higher than that in monthly costs. It is probably databases in a shared multi-tenant Aurora instance, and then the single-tenant plans that are currently in pilot give you the full Aurora instance. That also explains some of the limitations and the low connection limits.