PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
planetscale.com
PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#2I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting:
> We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict.
> Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans.
Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#3I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting: > We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict. > Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans. Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?
Yea but it's great marketing. It fits a few usecases of mine. And I think they reeled me in
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#4I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting: > We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict. > Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans. Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?
One of the most common complain was the read [1], and now they have upped the bundled limit and cost thereafter as $1 per billion reads.
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#5This is a nice change. It looks like it used to be $15/mo per 100 Million rows read, $15/mo per 10 Million rows written. Now it's $1 per billion reads and $1.50 per 1 million writes. So the write pricing hasn't changed, but the read pricing has gone from $150 per billion to $1 per billion (a reduction of 99.3%). $1 would have gotten me 6.7M reads before the change and now a billion reads (150x more reads for your dollar). That's a huge pricing change!
I'm guessing the "difficult to understand and hard for you to predict" is around how the read pricing is based on how many rows MySQL needs to read in order to serve your query. That's going to depend on how the query optimizer executes your query (and what indexes you've made and such).
It does make me wonder if I'm allowed to create as many indexes as I want without incurring additional "writes". Their billing page makes it seem like indexes don't count: https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing. In fact, their storage language makes it seem like indexes aren't charged for storage: "Data saved in the form of tables, columns, rows, and their corresponding relationships." I'm guessing that's just an oversight and the thinking is that "tables" covers indexes, but wouldn't "tables" also cover "columns, rows, and their corresponding relationships?" Given the expensive storage at $2.50/GB, how big things are seems to matter. Cockroach charges $1/GB (60% less), Google charges $0.34/GB for Cloud SQL HA storage, and $0.33/GB for Cloud Spanner storage (and 2-3x that if you're going multi-region). $2.50 is a big premium.
It still seems like there's an incentive to over-index rather than doing small filtering in-memory, though the incentive is now 99% smaller. Likewise, there seems to be no charge for doing something that requires sorting - or maybe they consider the sort to be a re-read of all the results? Looking over MySQL's explain analyze results, it looks like there shouldn't be a cost for reading through the index.
Sorry for the random thoughts. PlanetScale is a great project to offer a serverless MySQL on top of Vitess. I wish Vitess existed for PostgreSQL (we use Postgres' GIN indexes with JSON so it's not easy to move to MySQL).
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#6Worth noting "rows read" is not "rows returned". If you do 1000 full table scans on table with a million rows, you got a billion reads
https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing#understanding-...
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#7I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting: > We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict. > Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans. Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?
It was noteworthy change for me as I was considering PS for a new project but was a bit weary of the read limit and unwittingly hitting it. Now with the bigger numbers I feel that I have less to worry about and could just dive in.
And since as you mentioned from the post its a popular complaint so I figured others might be interested in this change as well.
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#8I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting: > We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict. > Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans. Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?
[deleted]
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#9Database reads/writes are really hard (read: impossible) to predict unless you are already in production. Leading to thoughts like: "1 Billion reads!! I'll never use that much..." Once you cross the line, the overages kick in.
That being said, this does appear to be absurdly cheap compared to competitors. Amazon Aurora appears to be sitting at around $200 a month for 1 billion reads, excluding writes/transfer/storage/etc.
CockroachDB Serverless includes 250M "request units" (request units include reads and writes and individual requests can costs multiple units depending on size). They charge an extra $1 per month per 10M "request units," so $75 to get to 1B reads at least.
Am I missing something? What's the catch?
Re: PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads
#10This is a nice change. It looks like it used to be $15/mo per 100 Million rows read, $15/mo per 10 Million rows written. Now it's $1 per billion reads and $1.50 per 1 million writes. So the write pricing hasn't changed, but the read pricing has gone from $150 per billion to $1 per billion (a reduction of 99.3%). $1 would have gotten me 6.7M reads before the change and now a billion reads (150x more reads for your dol…
If that's true, that will be similar to firestore when using limits and offsets. I really hate asymmetric pricing like this that forces developers to think in non standard way to reduce expenses. There is enough complexity as is in software development without more gotchas in billing.