The t3.micro database that "works fine in staging" OOMs under real load. The single-AZ deployment that''s been fine for two years fails the week of your biggest launch. Underprovisioning is the other edge of the cost/reliability tradeoff — and it has a much higher price.
Compare the top vector databases in 2026: Pinecone serverless, Weaviate multi-tenancy, Qdrant quantization, pgvector for Postgres, and when to use each.