I think it's more that PaaS vendors aren't interested in first-class SQLite support when they can sell overpriced managed Postgres instead. Sure, it doesn't scale the same way, so it's hard to move upmarket and sell to Enterprise, but it's a shame that there's no one-click solution like there is for a managed database.
* Someone who knows Django but has zero devops skills can deploy my app with a few simple commands, add a fix, and demo it to me. Crucial: They must ask me zero questions.
* The backups happen to a non-you service, I one-click auth my google drive and/or dropbox.
* There are instructions on how to stand-up the web app on another service if you shut down. Those instructions might require two hours of my time, but should be complete.
Interesting question. I think you could probably get those features by deploying Piku or Dokku for like $4/mo on a VPS, and the equivalent managed Postgres on Render would be like $20/mo (16GB SSD), so something like $6-10 seems like the right range to me. Maybe not a booming business, but a nice margin percentage and worth paying for good UX. And the cheap version doesn't need to be the only version if people want more RAM, etc.
I'd find such a product really appealing, especially with a dedicated backup strategy that uses the SQLite backup API to do hourly snapshots or uses Litestream to S3 by default.
Let's say the price was 12. If this idea is compelling enough for you at that price point to venmo me an advance for your first month, I have some ideas to explore that could actually make this viable. FWIW, I've worked professionally on a PaaS and a managed database offering.
