Nearbase vs AWS RDS: Cost and Latency in Asia
How Nearbase compares to AWS RDS on price, latency, and data residency for teams building in Asia and the Middle East.
AWS RDS is the default many teams reach for. It works, it is everywhere, and it is familiar. But if your users are in Asia or the Middle East, the default is often the wrong call on two fronts: cost and latency.
Cost
RDS pricing stacks up quickly. Beyond the instance itself you pay for provisioned IOPS, storage, backups, and cross-AZ data transfer, and the bill rarely matches the sticker price you started with.
Nearbase is designed to cost significantly less than major RDS providers for comparable workloads. Pricing is flat and transparent: you pay what you see, with no per-IOPS surprises. Check the current rates on the pricing page.
Latency
RDS coverage in Asia is thin. Many teams end up serving users in Jakarta, Manila, or Bangkok from a Singapore or Tokyo region, adding round-trip latency on every query.
Nearbase runs in local data centers across Asia, the Middle East, and North America, with sub-10ms latency to users in every major Asian population center. Deploy in the city closest to your users instead of the nearest available region.
Data residency
With RDS you have to architect carefully to keep data in-country. With Nearbase, when you pick a region, your data stays there, which makes meeting in-country data-residency requirements straightforward.
When RDS still makes sense
If your users and team are entirely inside a major AWS region in the US or Europe, and you are already deep in the AWS ecosystem, RDS is a reasonable choice. If it isn’t the right fit, it isn’t your only option. Check out managed Postgres alternatives to RDS side by side. Nearbase is built for the case AWS serves least well: teams who need Postgres close to users in Asia and the Middle East, without the ops or the bill.