Seems a bit expensive assuming each shard gets you three more servers. Based on RS pricing you could build your own instances with 1TB SSDs for like $500 each, so for the same price that you'd get 100GB x 3 shards you could do 1TB x 3 shards on your own. I guess with the RS pricing you also get managed backups but IMO that's not worth the price difference. If you figure you build your own, 3 shards x 3 RS members x 1TB is 9 servers at $500 each or $4500. With this service... if 100GB is $1599 you have to imagine 1TB has to be at least on the order of $10k, so you're looking at $30k total. $25k a month for managed backups and infrastructure just doesn't seem worth it to me. Maybe what they're using is more powerful than the instances we're on but I still have trouble reconciling the pricing. And if that 1TB is 1TB total and not 1TB per shard/replica set member then the pricing looks way, way worse.