A 1GB hosted Redis instance is $40/mo on Azure (which I’m told is competitive with AWS/GCP) yet a “bare-metal” instance with 1GB of memory (in which you can configure to run Redis yourself) is $5/mo.
Are all hosted infrastructure prices this inflated?
Backups, configuration and failover. Which traditionally meant a db guy or an ops guy which costs money. I've done it for multiple database technologies and doing it right is not at all easy or cheap on time.
With that said, Kubernetes might fix this because they have access to more parts of the system in a generic API. With tech like KubeDB[1] and other operators[2] we might see these prices coming closer to bare-metal.
[1] https://kubedb.com/ [2] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator