Backend

am i wrong to think that GCP Cloud SQL absolutely should not cost $254/month for the base instance type? this seems wildly expensive

Yeah gcp is way too expensive for dbs. Take a look at fly.io, less managed but more reasonably priced. I migrated there from gcp

Founder @tryethernal (https://tryethernal.com)

I use Firestore for our db but Fly for our backend. If you can get past the Firestore constraints it’s pretty solid

cma.xyz. Founder /paragraph, ceo /mirror, previously at Google & Coinbase 

If you have a good data structure, yeah. I didn't and once things started to scale the bill I was getting were insanes 😅, it was easier to move to postgres than to change the structure.