31–40 of 71 posts
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 pre…
> 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…
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 pre…
Quote from the article:
> At $250/month for 4 databases without any replicas, we were paying premium prices for subpar reliability.
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.
> 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…
No, it was not my intention for price to be the main thing people hooked in on with this article. It's the combination of it all. Better reliability, performance, and infrastructure AND it's more affordable.
> warrant a full time dedicated engineer
TBH, it's basically my sole full time job as the CTO.
> half a technical write-up, half an ad for both companies
I've been frustrated by Neon for months now and excited about PlanetScale's new postgres offering. Was pleasantly surprised by it too and wanted to write about it. I do appreciate you writing this and sorry if it comes up too much like an ad for us. Only meant to share our unique experiences and satisfaction with a new thing.
> 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…
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Their dashboards and metrics are really good. Plus the performance is great even on their non-metal offering too. I hope to one day be able to justify the upgrade to it. Here's their announcement blog post with a bit more info, like their benchmarks: https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres