> but even the smallest startup wants to be able to avoid data loss

Seems true at a glance!

> and downtime.

Maybe less so - I think there’s plenty out there, where they’re not chasing nines and care more about building software instead of some HA setup. Probably solve that issue when you have enough customers to actually justify the engineering time. A few minutes of downtime every now and then isn’t the end of the world if it buys you operational simplicity.