Dev & Staging Environments

Stop sharing a staging database. Every branch gets its own, spun up in milliseconds and torn down when merged.

Shared staging is a lie

You know the drill. Someone runs a migration on the staging database and breaks three other feature branches. Test data from last sprint is polluting this sprint's integration tests. Nobody trusts the data in staging because six developers are running six different branches against the same tables.

The fix is obvious: one database per branch. But RDS takes 5-10 minutes to provision and costs $50+/mo per instance. Even Neon takes seconds. At 20 developers with 3 branches each, you're looking at 60 database instances. Nobody is going to approve that bill.

A database for every branch

Create a database via API when a PR opens. Clone production data into it. Run your tests against real data in a real, isolated database. Merge the PR, delete the database. The whole lifecycle fits in a CI script.

→ Spin up in milliseconds — fast enough to create inside your CI pipeline without slowing it down
→ Clone production data for realistic testing without touching prod
→ Abandoned branches auto-archive to cloud storage — no zombie databases
→ Same connection string format as production — no env-specific config drift
→ Delete on merge — one API call in your CI teardown step

What it costs

20 developers, 3 branches each, 500MB per database. 60 databases total. Maybe 10 are actively being tested at any given time.

	RDS per branch	Cinch
10 active branches	~$500/mo	~$2.50/mo
50 idle branches	~$2,500/mo	~$5/mo
Total	~$3,000/mo	~$7.50/mo

500MB per branch. Active = $0.50/GB NVMe. Idle = $0.20/GB cloud storage.

Branch your database like you branch your code

Create in milliseconds with real data. Costs nothing when idle.

GET STARTED →