For simple needs Salesforce isn't even that expensive, we have around ~38 "App Cloud" licenses - that adds up to $950/mo to not deal with data scattered everywhere, not needing to waste my time designing a full CRUD app with security, managing a database server, etc.
It helps to have an experienced Salesforce admin though, I love the "citizen developer" that Salesforce always preaches but you can run into a mess if you don't think your data model through like any other database.
> cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition
Plenty of decent sync products to make this not stink. We happily pay for DBAmp every year to keep all our data on-site so we can expose it to other users and to keep a backup of pruned data.
Storage costs are certainly something to be weary of, and something I have always hone through great efforts to minimize.
We have just over 5GB of total storage in our org and are only using ~45MB after a year because we planned out model around both storage efficiency and a sane data model.
You don't use fully normalized database designs in Salesforce if you can avoid it.
It helps to have an experienced Salesforce admin though, I love the "citizen developer" that Salesforce always preaches but you can run into a mess if you don't think your data model through like any other database.
> cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition
Plenty of decent sync products to make this not stink. We happily pay for DBAmp every year to keep all our data on-site so we can expose it to other users and to keep a backup of pruned data.