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Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

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Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#61

Post by jorams »

anthonyronning wrote: post #58
jorams wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having plugged your numbers into the pricing for both Neon and Planetscale I'm rather confused. At Planetscale, given the numbers cited in the post, you're paying for 4 servers (+ replicas) with one eighth of a vCPU each, running 24/7. That's equivalent to about 375 Neon compute-hours per month. Your $69 Neon plan included twice that. Neon only goes down to 1/4th of a vCPU, but that does include the same amount of me…

Honestly, I don't even know. My last month bill was for 1947 compute hours for a total of $260. I just have the 4 databases. Looks like two of them are at .5 instead of .25, maybe that's it? Unless they are auto scaling me up occasionally and I'm not aware?

Two of them being at 0.5 brings the total to 1.5 vCPU, which over an entire month adds about another 375 compute hours for an extra $60, which is still much lower. Indeed autoscaling seems like it could be the cause. According to the documentation that's a setting you can configure per "compute", but I don't know if it's the default.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#63

Post by unixhero »

xmorse wrote: post #55
unixhero wrote: post #47

I am bullish on fly.io

I am not. No one ever heard of their managed postgres and they already started calling it with an acronym

It could be that you have legitimate concerns regarding fly.io, things that I have not considered.

But I for one see zero acronyms on their managed postgres product information page: https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ *

* Except in the url

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#64

Post by gr4vityWall »

anthonyronning wrote: post #35
gr4vityWall wrote: post #28

> 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…

> And 250 dollars/month was considered expensive 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…

No problem. I appreciate the technical details of your article. Best of luck to your startup.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#65

Post by const_cast »

swiftcoder wrote: post #43
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week. If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.

Even if it's pretty bursty, usually a perm server is still cheaper. Running the server only half the time isn't burning too much money since AWS is already 10x the cost of raw compute. You need really bursty workloads to make serverless make sense.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#66

Post by const_cast »

mooreds wrote: post #21
abound wrote: post #17

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…

This is a viable business model in the same way planned obsolence and enshittification are.

This sucks major donkey dick and I can't think of a single dev who would actually want this.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#67

Post by mooreds »

gausswho wrote: post #52
JavierFlores09 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It doe…

> Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable. I appreciate the... tough love here, and also acknowledge that 'doing it for love' is ambiguous. But I strongly disagree that declining to make something profitable indicates that it's not out of love. To clarify my own s…

> But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.

Hmmm. I looked at one site with a fair amount of traffic that I have access to and the user agents that identified as AI crawlers were not significant in terms of traffic. Low single digits.

Curious what percentage of AI crawlers your site is seeing?

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#68

Post by mooreds »

const_cast wrote: post #66
mooreds wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is a viable business model in the same way planned obsolence and enshittification are. This sucks major donkey dick and I can't think of a single dev who would actually want this.

And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans.

And companies keep offering them.

The ones that don't make waves because of how unusual they are (see Planetscale and this discussion: https://scalingdevtools.com/podcast/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo... )

I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment. I suspect that is the cause.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#69

Post by const_cast »

mooreds wrote: post #68
const_cast wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a viable business model in the same way planned obsolence and enshittification are. This sucks major donkey dick and I can't think of a single dev who would actually want this.

And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans. And companies keep offering them. The ones that don't make waves because of how unusual they are (see Planetscale and this discussion: https://scalingdevtools.com/podcast/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo... ) I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in…

> And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans.

Yeah, because devs are stupid. Because consumers, as a whole, are stupid. They're short-sighted and self-destructive. Just ask Marlboro.

> I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment.

Yes, this is a fundamental character flaw present in every human, to varying degrees. Its a function of how our reward center works.

Exploiting that flaw for money-making is a dark pattern at best, and a crime against humanity at worst.

This right here is just a dark pattern. Using a vulnerability in the human mind for an exploit that, on average, extracts cash you wouldn't otherwise get.

Personally, I don't think it's that bad. But it is a dark pattern and I don't like it. So, there.

Re: Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

#70

Post by swiftcoder »

const_cast wrote: post #65
swiftcoder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week. If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.

Even if it's pretty bursty, usually a perm server is still cheaper. Running the server only half the time isn't burning too much money since AWS is already 10x the cost of raw compute. You need really bursty workloads to make serverless make sense.

If we're talking about relatively small workloads, and relatively stable traffic, then sure.

But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best

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