PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.

[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...

[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#5

Post by reducesuffering » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:02 PM UTC

I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?

Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#6

Post by samlambert » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

reducesuffering wrote: post #5

I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here? Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain…

Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#7

Post by oompydoompy74 » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

htrp wrote: post #3

Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node

Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#8

Post by samlambert » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

saxenaabhi wrote: post #4

I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS. My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded. [1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-…

It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#9

Post by jszymborski » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

samlambert wrote: post #6

reducesuffering wrote: post #5

I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here? Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain…

Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.

A bit of unsolicited advice:

This post is the first time I've heard of your company and your blog post interested me.

When proprietors go to the mat in the comment section, I immediately lose any interest in patronizing them.

Re: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

#10

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

reducesuffering wrote: post #5

I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here? Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain…

[deleted]