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Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

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Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#21

Post by mooreds »

abound wrote: post #17
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your project is getting more and more usage, surely that requires more expenses. What is your alternative?

I think GP is calling out the highly non-linear nature of the pricing. $20 for the first TB and then $50/100 GB after is a 25x jump in pricing. Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.

> the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.

Depends on the provider's business model.

Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.

But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.

This is a valid strategy for two reasons:

- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk

- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying

The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#22

Post by robertlagrant »

abound wrote: post #17
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your project is getting more and more usage, surely that requires more expenses. What is your alternative?

I think GP is calling out the highly non-linear nature of the pricing. $20 for the first TB and then $50/100 GB after is a 25x jump in pricing. Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.

Yes - they've inverted it to allow smaller projects to onboard very cheaply.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#23

Post by asib »

anthonyronning wrote: post #6
asib wrote: post #3

> 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.

Maybe you were referring to specifics of Neon's usage-based pricing.

The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#24

Post by asib »

gausswho wrote: post #5
asib wrote: post #3

> 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.

I hear you on that, but I would say "usage-based pricing" does not equate to "increasing marginal cost" at all. There are both usage-based providers that have increasing marginal cost and those that don't.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#25

Post by Insanity »

anthonyronning wrote: post #10
cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #8

They can't afford database administration? Is it that expensive to hire a DBA?

Pre-seed stage startup of two people. No, we can't hire a DBA.

Good luck with the startup. TBH, I think going for as much managed solutions as possible while you bootstrap makes sense. Something more tailor-made often doesn't make sense until you start scaling.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#26

Post by anthonyronning »

asib wrote: post #23
anthonyronning wrote: post #6

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.

Maybe you were referring to specifics of Neon's usage-based pricing. The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.

I see. Yeah I'm not against usage-based in general. Just specific to database's, especially in my instance where it feels like I'm paying more for the luxury of having a scale-to-zero feature that I've quickly grown beyond.

I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.

It just happens to be a lot more affordable too.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#28

Post by gr4vityWall »

> We have thousands of users generating thousands of chats daily. Lawyers discussing sensitive cases. Executives planning strategy. Developers working on proprietary code. They trust us because their data is mathematically guaranteed to be private. But that trust evaporates quickly when the service is unavailable.

And 250 dollars/month was considered expensive for the infrastructure handling that? My first impression is that based on the stakes alone, that would warrant a full time dedicated engineer.

Not gonna lie, although I appreciate the comparison and that they shared their experience publicly, this post sounds like half a technical write-up, half an ad for both companies.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#29

Post by anthonyronning »

Insanity wrote: post #25
anthonyronning wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-seed stage startup of two people. No, we can't hire a DBA.

Good luck with the startup. TBH, I think going for as much managed solutions as possible while you bootstrap makes sense. Something more tailor-made often doesn't make sense until you start scaling.

Thank you! Yes, totally agree. I do hope to get there one day and would LOVE nothing more than to have a DBA take this to the next steps when we're bigger.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#30

Post by Insanity »

We're experimenting with Lakebase now (Databricks' name for Neon).

Initial results are actually pretty cool when using the UI to spin it up. The API leaves some things to be desired (bad error messages that obfuscate the actual error, undocumented rate limiting, ..).

Plus, there's been quite a number of strange bugs we ran into, like tables that don't recreate correctly because of dangling resources.

Overall, I'm pretty excited about the product because it makes life a bit easier, but it's not really 'production quality yet'.

(Alternatively, maybe we're just doing things in a bad way while we're learning to use it, so it could be a PEBKAC type of issue, rather than a Lakebase issue).

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