Every data warehouse is sold the same way: more scale, more speed, for a little more money. What actually changes underneath is harder to find. Here's the short version.
A managed Postgres
Cheap, familiar, and plenty for most teams under a few hundred GB. It's the right starting point for the same reason it's the right starting point for an app's database — you already know how to run it.
Cloud warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)
Built for analytical queries over huge tables — scanning billions of rows in seconds by storing data in columns instead of rows. Worth it once dashboards start timing out on Postgres.
Lakehouses
Store raw files (often Parquet) in object storage and query them directly — cheaper at scale, with a bit more setup before the first query runs.
Start with the smallest engine that runs your actual query patterns. Upgrading later is a migration, not a button — so don't pay for scale you don't have yet.