It's pretty easy these days to spin up a local Postgres container. Might as well use it for prototyping too, and save yourself the hassle of switching later.

It might seem minor, but the little things add up. Make your dev environment mirror prod from the start will save you a bunch of headaches. Then, when you're ready to deploy, there is nothing to change.

Even better, stage to a production-like environment early, and then deploy day can be as simple as a DNS record change.

Thanks to LetsEncrypt DNS-01, you can absolutely spin up a production-like environment with SSL and everything. It's definitely worth doing.