Managed vs Self-Managed

Managed services cost more per unit of compute and less per unit of attention. The comparison is only honest when the attention is priced: patching, upgrades, backup verification, capacity planning, failover testing, on-call, and the specialist you need to hire and keep.

Choose managed by default. The exceptions are real but narrow: an unusual configuration the managed version does not support, a regulatory constraint on where and how the data is handled, a scale at which the price delta genuinely exceeds a team's cost, or a capability so core to the product that operating it is the differentiation.

The counter-consideration is lock-in, and the useful way to price it is exit cost: how long would it take to move, and what would you have to rewrite? For a managed Postgres, low. For a managed workflow engine with a proprietary DSL, high.