We Ditched SQL Server 2025 for PostgreSQL 17: Cut Licensing Costs by 100% for Enterprise SaaS For three years, our enterprise SaaS platform ran exclusively on Microsoft SQL Server 2025. It was a reliable workhorse: always-on availability groups kept our 50+ tenant databases online, transparent data encryption (TDE) met our SOC 2 and GDPR compliance requirements, and T-SQL stored procedures powered our most complex billing and reporting workflows. But by Q3 2024, our annual licensing bill had hit $420,000 — and with plans to double our tenant count in 2025, that cost was set to balloon to over $800k. We needed a change. Why SQL Server 2025 Was No Longer Sustainable SQL Server 2025’s licensing model was the primary pain point. We paid per-core fees for enterprise edition across 128 production cores, plus Client Access Licenses (CALs) for our internal operations team, and add-on fees for features like advanced analytics and hybrid cloud integration — most of which we never used.…