Hey that's really cool, thanks! I'll consider adding a link to it in the repo.
I'm a little skeptical that any given PostgreSQL free tier will stick around indefinitely, after what happened with Heroku. And once you hit 500MB, you jump immediately to $25/mo, so if you're running a hobby project, your choice is either to delete data or start paying $300/year. On the other hand, I'd expect a well-optimized read-heavy SQLite app to scale to 10GB+ without breaking a sweat (speculating wildly) and costing more like $3/mo in storage.
I speak from experience here—until recently, I ran a site that would have been 10x cheaper if it had used pure SQLite instead of managed Postgres.
PasS my ass. What's so difficult about setting up a VPS and installing PostgreSQL, MySQL or whatever floats your boat? At Hetzner.com (no I don't work for them) you can get a dual-CPU VPS with 4Gb RAM, 40Gb SSD and 20TB traffic. That'll get you off to the races with Spring Boot and PostgreSQL if you limit the JVM to half the available RAM. For something like Rails, Laravel or Express even easier.
For that price you can get a $10 dedicated server with similar specs. Installing and configuring Postgres isn't a big deal. There are several helpful guides available. For small projects the config isn't important at all. For everything else it is just editing a few lines in a text file.
I'm not sure where the impression that this is some arcane art comes from. For a typical Debian system it is just an apt-get. Yes, the default config has tiny limits for work_mem. Just edit the .conf
Part of this might be that AWS or whichever other proprietary environment has captured developer knowledge at this point. Instead of sane INSTALL files, projects tell users to use a prepacked Docker image.
By doing so, I am a failure, and whatever I'm doing is not worthwhile because installing PostgreSQL on my $20 VPS means I cannot possibly achieve /Google/Facebook/Amazon/ scale.
One significant caveat: "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity." I'm not complaining, but I reckon a lot of hobby projects would see sporadic activity. For example, I used to upload a list of my CDs to a VPS, so that when I found something interesting at a music store, I could check to see whether I already own it (#FirstWorldProblems).
I think your message implies that performance is the axis that matters and if you don’t need performance at all you should use something other than SQLite (like a file system with json)?
Supabase (https://supabase.com/pricing) has an amazing free tier for PostgreSQL which gives you up to a 500MB database.
Note: I'm not affiliated in any way with supabase.com.