Someone ping guys at MariaDB, their pricing is pre-cloud era (mariadb.com)

Considering that the yearly cost of a first-world sysadmin is north of $200k (it's not just salary), finding someone to tend to the database for under $10k is a pretty good deal.

Worth remembering: you need to have a team of ~10 people in order for the on-call schedule to be anything other than brutal.