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What exactly is PlanetScale Postgres? Is it plain managed Postgres ala RDS or something more bespoke like Neon? I know PlanetScale is working on a Vitess-like sharded Postgres (Neki?) but I’m guessing that is not yet running in the cloud?
They can't afford database administration? Is it that expensive to hire a DBA?
> Beyond reliability, we faced other challenges: > - Usage-based pricing that punished our success, the more users chatted, the more we paid This is such a strange position on usage-based pricing and seems telling.
Yeah, at a certain point it's just always running 24/7, which they charge you usage-based if your company is over 750 hours in a month. If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
> Beyond reliability, we faced other challenges: > - Usage-based pricing that punished our success, the more users chatted, the more we paid This is such a strange position on usage-based pricing and seems telling.
Not necessarily. Netlify told me as I had blown past 20 bucks for 1TB of traffic that paying 50 bucks for every additional 100GB was 'a good problem to have'. Well no, not at all. If your project is one of love, the end game is not subjecting your audience to boatloads of ads.
What exactly is PlanetScale Postgres? Is it plain managed Postgres ala RDS or something more bespoke like Neon? I know PlanetScale is working on a Vitess-like sharded Postgres (Neki?) but I’m guessing that is not yet running in the cloud?
It's more like rds but it has far better developer experience than rds with dashboards and better migration. Their unique offering is their metal offering which uses local SSD for superior performance https://planetscale.com/metal
Here's their announcement blog post with a bit more info, like their benchmarks:
> Beyond reliability, we faced other challenges: > - Usage-based pricing that punished our success, the more users chatted, the more we paid This is such a strange position on usage-based pricing and seems telling.
Yeah, at a certain point it's just always running 24/7, which they charge you usage-based if your company is over 750 hours in a month. If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. Netlify told me as I had blown past 20 bucks for 1TB of traffic that paying 50 bucks for every additional 100GB was 'a good problem to have'. Well no, not at all. If your project is one of love, the end game is not subjecting your audience to boatloads of ads.
But if your project is getting more and more usage, surely that requires more expenses. What is your alternative?
Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
Neon doesnt have usage based pricing it has autoscaling, there is a difference.
We get 750 compute hours per month across our entire org, then charged 16c per hour.
Usage based pricing typically implies paying per number of requests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, at a certain point it's just always running 24/7, which they charge you usage-based if your company is over 750 hours in a month. If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
This pitfall of "serverless" has been widely known since people started abusing lambda to be "always on". Serverless is a PaaS gaslight to make you pay more for the perceived convenience.
this is great to see. thank you for the write up.