The Crunchy Bridge alternative
built for AI teams.

Crunchy Bridge is a well-built managed Postgres and a genuine flat-priced competitor, one of the few honest alternatives in the market. The reasons teams look at Rivestack instead are usually focused: they want pgvector ready to go without manual tuning, they need EU data residency for GDPR compliance without thinking about it, or they are a small AI team who wants a product built for RAG workloads rather than a general Postgres platform. If any of those apply, Rivestack is worth comparing.

Crunchy is actually cheaper at the very entry tier: their smallest instance runs around $10/mo versus $29/mo for Rivestack Solo. Both are flat pricing with no usage metering, so neither has a billing surprise problem. The practical difference is that Rivestack Solo includes the first month free, and the pricing climb from entry to production is similar on both. For most AI teams the $5/mo entry gap is less significant than product focus and data residency.

Three things. First, pgvector ships pre-installed and HNSW-tuned: we measure recall@10 0.90+ at low-single-digit-ms p50 on 250k × 1536 vectors, and ~2,950 QPS at 16 clients on a Growth node (4 vCPU / 8 GB; reproducible tables at /pgvector-benchmarks-measured), without any tuning work on your end. Second, EU-first data residency by default: all data and backups stay in Falkenstein, Germany unless you choose otherwise. And third, a managed embedding workflow for RAG teams who want auto-embed support in Postgres without building the pipeline themselves.

If you are running serious DBA workloads, need a more established platform, or Postgres is your core infrastructure rather than a vector store, Crunchy Bridge earns its reputation, because they have strong Postgres pedigree and tooling. Similarly, if you need a very low-entry price and pgvector is not your primary concern, their ~$10/mo entry is cheaper. Rivestack is focused on small and mid AI teams specifically; if you are an enterprise DBA team, Crunchy is probably the better fit.

Both platforms are standard Postgres, so this is one of the simpler infrastructure migrations you can do. pg_dump / pg_restore handles most databases in minutes; for larger always-on systems we use logical replication and a sub-minute cutover. Your pgvector schema, indexes, and queries move unchanged. Migration help is free: email rescue@rivestack.io or see the Switch offer page and we will plan it with you.

Yes, and without any setup work. pgvector is pre-installed and tuned: HNSW indexes are built with production settings and we measure ~2 ms single-client p50 at recall@10 0.90 on 250k × 1536 vectors, scaling to thousands of QPS per node by size. The Scale node serves 1M × 1536 hot at ~3,600 QPS. Your existing pgvector schema, indexes, and queries move over unchanged from any standard Postgres host.

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, backed up daily to separate S3-compatible storage within the EU with point-in-time recovery, and HA clusters run Patroni-managed automatic failover. We are an EU company, so GDPR obligations are built-in rather than a compliance add-on. DPAs are available on request. And because it is vanilla PostgreSQL, you can pg_dump your entire database and leave at any moment, with no lock-in.

Yes. The free tier gives you a Postgres database with pgvector in about a minute, no credit card. Load a sample of your vectors, run your real queries, and measure latency before you commit. Solo is the first month free if you want to run a production workload in parallel and compare directly.