I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
free tiers are a subsidy paid by either VCs or paid users that in some cases can function as a marketing cost, if the free tier is time-limited and thus represents a finite cost to the business.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
oh how i wish they were in azure. azure's postgresql flex offering is horrid. for some reason the HA standby instance can't be used as a read replica, it's filled with maintenance windows / downtime-ful upgrades / etc..
This is actually a really interesting offering to have available as someone who needs DEV tier PG databases for a better testing pipeline on a shoestring budget.
Should I consider this if I’m using Render or fly.io for my services? Would latency be an issue? On my day job I cluster in the same AWS AZ and don’t realize what impact this would have for an app that may not be colocated.
Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
Haha people have sent it to me! I'm currently trying to make it on my own in the wide world though.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
I think it is amusing that half the comments section here is complaining about the lack of a free plan and the other half is complaining that the $5 plan is too cheap for them to keep it around.
I'm surprised so many replies here are about removing a free tier 2 years ago. Things cost money, what did you expect? Whenever I get free products that cost money I expect it's either temporary, or I'm being the product myself.
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
Most shared hosting services offer something similar for about the same price. On Dreamhost, the database servers are independent of the hosting servers. You can access the database servers from outside Dreamhost, if you configure MySQL to allow it.
I guess this is one of the 2 or 3 things Sam talked about coming till end of year. I wonder what's the other 1 or 2.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
I want to like this so bad, but the free tier changes still haunt me. I ran a little hobby project for a while on it that helped junior developers find jobs. The work needed to switch from PlanetScale ultimately meant I just canned the project.
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.
Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.
At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".
Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.
They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
33 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] threadMy interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...
[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!
PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw
[1] https://neon.com
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
and Sam's response
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.
Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.
At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".
Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.
They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.