[bmcahren]

MongoDB Atlas was around 500% more expensive than in-house every time I evaluated it (at almost every scale they offer as well).

They also leaned too heavily on sharding as a universal solution to scaling as opposed to leveraging the minimal cost of terabytes of RAM. The p99 latency increase, risk of major re-sharding downtime, increased restore times, and increased operational complexity weren't worth it for ~1 TB datasets.

[winrid]

That's because sharding is way more likely to make them more money with their licensing model.