8. Relying solely on cloud-managed PostgreSQL

Many cloud providers offer "PostgreSQL-compatible" services that promise simplicity but actually reintroduce the same proprietary lock-in you were trying to escape. These services often impose serious limitations: configuration restrictions that hamper performance, sudden cost spikes as your data grows, and proprietary implementations that quietly bind you to their ecosystem—much like the traditional proprietary databases you aimed to replace. When you discover these constraints, migrating away becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.

What's often overlooked is that true PostgreSQL deployments maintain your freedom to move across environments while proprietary cloud offerings subtly eliminate this flexibility through custom extensions and management layers. Like traditional proprietary databases, they create dependency through convenience features that gradually become impossible to leave behind.

Consider this: For organizations in healthcare, financial services, government, and other regulated industries, cloud-managed PostgreSQL often fails to meet compliance requirements that mandate on-premises data storage and complete control over database security. When proprietary cloud offerings can't address these regulatory needs, organizations find themselves forced into costly hybrid architectures or complex workarounds that their chosen vendor never designed for.