Honest comparison
Firedrill vs a DIY pg_dump cron job
A cron job running pg_dump into S3 costs almost nothing and teaches you how your database works. We're not going to pretend it's crazy — half of us ran exactly that for years. Here's what it doesn't give you, learned the hard way.
Where DIY pg_dump scripts is genuinely good
- ✔ Free (minus your time) and fully under your control
- ✔ No third party ever touches your data
- ✔ Infinitely customizable — filters, schedules, destinations
Side by side
| DIY pg_dump scripts | Firedrill | |
|---|---|---|
| Silent failure | Cron doesn't tell you it stopped; most DIY scripts fail silently for months | Every scheduled run heartbeats a dead-man switch — silence itself raises an alert |
| Restore testing | Almost nobody's script restores the dump and checks it | Every backup restored and checked: exit code, schema hash, tables, row counts, amcheck, sample queries |
| Version matching | pg_dump from apt may not match your server major | Version-matched binaries 14–17, selected automatically |
| Encryption & key handling | Usually a bucket-level setting, if that | Client-side AES-256-GCM, per-project data keys, envelope encryption |
| Retention | A find -mtime +30 -delete if you remembered | GFS retention (7 daily / 4 weekly / 12 monthly), never prunes the last verified backup |
| Cost | ~$0 plus the incident where it turns out the backup was empty | From $19/mo |
If you'll genuinely maintain the script, test restores quarterly, and monitor the monitor — DIY is defensible. If you'd rather that be someone's whole job, that's ours. Either way: restore-test whatever you have this week. Our free verification will do it for you once a month, no signup.