Just using Timescale instead of RDS or Cloud SQL PostgreSQL would be a virtual assumption, but with the starting price points so much higher it makes the decision to START with Timescale a lot harder.
If you do want a lower priced option, we actually recently also released a second managed cloud offering in public preview, Timescale Forge: https://timescale.com/forge.
Timescale Cloud provides great flexibility with multi-cloud and 75+ regions, security conscious options like VPC peering and SOC2/ISO/HIPAA compliance, and a more traditional DBaaS Experience.
Timescale Forge is a innovative platform with capabilities like decoupled compute and storage (so you can select yourself the exact configuration you want, starting at $49/month), instant pause/resume, native support for our Prometheus integration, and more coming...
I could very much imagine that I might outgrow the $49 option, but not to the point where I'm willing to pay triple that amount.
I'm not necessarily saying you should change it, maybe its just messaging and targetting. I guess on HN you just get a load of us who are interested in using it for smaller projects (where the 49 option might be perfectly fine, of course).
If people want to play around with timescaleDB for cheap, DigitalOcean claims that their managed postgres supports the timescale extension, but I've never tried it.
So you don't get native compression, continuous aggregates, downsampling, etc., many of which make the Timescale Cloud version actually less expensive when considering capabilities (e.g., 50GB on Timescale Cloud can store akin to 1TB elsewhere and have faster queries, continuous aggs mean faster and less-CPU to run dashboards, etc).