Postgres Or A Real Warehouse First

Postgres can probably carry your analytics longer than you think.

A read replica, a few materialized views and dbt on top will carry a lot. For many 30-person SaaS companies, that’s enough for a year or two.

Teams move to a warehouse early because it feels like the grown-up choice. Then they’re maintaining ingestion, a second permission model and a new bill, for a data volume Postgres handled fine.

The questions I’d ask before moving:

1. Are analytical queries slowing down the product? On a replica, probably not yet.
2. Do you need data from outside the app? Stripe, HubSpot, the ad platforms. This is usually the one that forces the move.
3. Are your largest tables heading into hundreds of millions of rows with wide scans?
4. Is anyone asking for history your app overwrites?

If none of them apply, stay put and spend the time on modeling. Clean models on Postgres move to a warehouse in weeks. Messy ones take their mess with them.

One yes is a warning. Two is when I’d start planning the move.

I lean toward waiting. I’ve also seen teams wait until the month of the board deck, which is the worst time to migrate anything.

Which of the four would make you move first?