The distinction between “managed” and “automated” (what we call Fly Postgres) is a little fuzzy, but we’re erring on the side of under promising.
Managed usually means someone will get an alert when a service breaks, then drag themselves out of bed and fix the issue. We do manage the infrastructure underneath, but we do not respond to postgres specific issues (like running out of disk space or out of memory errors).
Automated postgres is enough for many apps! It’s very cheap to run, and works well for 99% of users. But some people think it’s worth paying 2-3x the price to have a on call DBAs jump in and fix things if they break. I don’t fault these people, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on that kind of peace of mind.
Aiven does seem great, so does Crunchy Bridge. If you want that level of service, you can happily use these with your Fly apps. For the most part, they’ll be <1ms round trip latency from cities we share with AWS/GCP. Fly.io IAD and AWS us-east-1, for example, work just fine together.