I Got Tired of My Database Sleeping

My portfolio has a chatbot. It answers questions about my projects and experience.

For the AI to know anything about me, it needs to search through my content first. That's called RAG — the bot retrieves relevant stuff, then answers based on it.

I was using Astra DB for this. Free tier, serverless, seemed perfect.

Problem: the free tier hibernates after a couple days of no activity. When someone finally visits and tries to chat, the database is asleep. The request hangs. Sometimes it times out. Sometimes my builds just fail because the database won't wake up in time. Once it even deleted my data because I hadn't used it in a while.

I got tired of it.

So I started looking at alternatives. Vercel Postgres with pgvector was an option, but setting up migrations and managing SQL felt like overkill for a portfolio. I also considered just storing everything locally as a JSON file and doing the search in memory — but that felt hacky and would slow things down.

Then I remembered: I'm already using OpenAI for the chatbot itself. Why not use their vector store too?

OpenAI has a vector store feature where you upload your files and they handle the rest. No database to manage. No hibernation. Same provider I'm already paying for.

So I switched. The chatbot is faster now, the code is simpler, and I don't have to babysit a sleeping database anymore.

There's a small cost, but for a portfolio this size it's basically nothing. And honestly? Sometimes the "free" option costs more in frustration than it's worth.