I want to set up a staging database that’s more affordable than the lowest tier managed option (which seems to be in the $30 range per month). What do others do to keep costs down in lower environments? Happy to pay in production when I get there but seems expensive to build on.
The legacy pg has been painful to connect and the “legacy” makes me feel it can be deprecated at any moment.
you will always be able to run the “legacy” unmanaged postgres:
if you are using MPG for production, you can also create a new user/db inside your production cluster for development so you don’t need to pay more: https://fly.io/docs/mpg/configuration/#creating-additional-users
SQlite 
You are using a database library that abstracts the underlying data store, aren’t you?
A few alternatives were bounced around here:
Supabase free tier gets a 
from me.
@roadmr that makes sense, how would you set that up, in the same container?
Ha, I was half thinking that I could just grab a cheaper option elsewhere for staging! I might go this route, maybe not supabase cause I don’t want the cruft but same idea.
Interesting, I hadn’t considered that, I’ll try that before the SQLite option below. Ithink