PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads

https://planetscale.com/blog/increasing-planetscale-plan-limits-to-include-billions-of-reads

by synunlimited • 4 years ago

136 68 4 years ago

vosper• 4 years ago

I'm not really sure why a pricing change is HN-worthy, but I guess here I am biting:

We’ve also heard your feedback about how our pricing is difficult to understand and hard for you to predict.
Starting March 1st we’ll be offering our customers up to 200x more reads across all pricing plans.

Just giving more reads doesn't seem like it's actually simplifying pricing or making it more predictable?

getcrunk• 4 years ago

Yea but it's great marketing. It fits a few usecases of mine. And I think they reeled me in

ksec2• 4 years ago

One of the most common complain was the read [1], and now they have upped the bundled limit and cost thereafter as $1 per billion reads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132572

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but they didn’t actually adress the problem they stated customers had in their own blog post.

It feels like they’re just kicking the can down the road by increasing their numbers.

synunlimited• 4 years ago

It was noteworthy change for me as I was considering PS for a new project but was a bit weary of the read limit and unwittingly hitting it. Now with the bigger numbers I feel that I have less to worry about and could just dive in.

And since as you mentioned from the post its a popular complaint so I figured others might be interested in this change as well.

mdasen• 4 years ago

This is a nice change. It looks like it used to be $15/mo per 100 Million rows read, $15/mo per 10 Million rows written. Now it's $1 per billion reads and $1.50 per 1 million writes. So the write pricing hasn't changed, but the read pricing has gone from $150 per billion to $1 per billion (a reduction of 99.3%). $1 would have gotten me 6.7M reads before the change and now a billion reads (150x more reads for your dollar). That's a huge pricing change!

I'm guessing the "difficult to understand and hard for you to predict" is around how the read pricing is based on how many rows MySQL needs to read in order to serve your query. That's going to depend on how the query optimizer executes your query (and what indexes you've made and such).

It does make me wonder if I'm allowed to create as many indexes as I want without incurring additional "writes". Their billing page makes it seem like indexes don't count: https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing. In fact, their storage language makes it seem like indexes aren't charged for storage: "Data saved in the form of tables, columns, rows, and their corresponding relationships." I'm guessing that's just an oversight and the thinking is that "tables" covers indexes, but wouldn't "tables" also cover "columns, rows, and their corresponding relationships?" Given the expensive storage at $2.50/GB, how big things are seems to matter. Cockroach charges $1/GB (60% less), Google charges $0.34/GB for Cloud SQL HA storage, and $0.33/GB for Cloud Spanner storage (and 2-3x that if you're going multi-region). $2.50 is a big premium.

It still seems like there's an incentive to over-index rather than doing small filtering in-memory, though the incentive is now 99% smaller. Likewise, there seems to be no charge for doing something that requires sorting - or maybe they consider the sort to be a re-read of all the results? Looking over MySQL's explain analyze results, it looks like there shouldn't be a cost for reading through the index.

Sorry for the random thoughts. PlanetScale is a great project to offer a serverless MySQL on top of Vitess. I wish Vitess existed for PostgreSQL (we use Postgres' GIN indexes with JSON so it's not easy to move to MySQL).

allisdust2• 4 years ago

If that's true, that will be similar to firestore when using limits and offsets. I really hate asymmetric pricing like this that forces developers to think in non standard way to reduce expenses. There is enough complexity as is in software development without more gotchas in billing.

abofh2• 4 years ago

You're almost always being charged for the resources you use, the gotcha is that they aren't free

samlambert2• 4 years ago

Thank you for your thoughts. We are continuing to iterate. Pricing in the serverless world is a new craft and there is lots to improve on. We were very excited to see other companies follow suit with serverless pricing models after our launch.

A lot went into making this iteration on our pricing. We spoke to customers, we reviewed all of our billing to make sure that this would save money for nearly all of our customers (the bill has increased for 2 customers because they have very unique workloads, we are providing them discounts to mitigate).

One thing to mention is that our storage includes replication of the data. We never want customers to worry about how many copies to keep to achieve HA so we do that for them and that is represented in this price.

We are continuing to optimize with the customer in mind and I am sure there will be further iterations. Stay tuned!

finnh• 4 years ago

GP had direct questions which you did not answer.

felixr• 4 years ago

Worth noting "rows read" is not "rows returned". If you do 1000 full table scans on table with a million rows, you got a billion reads

https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing#understanding-...

allisdust2• 4 years ago

This comment has to be higher up. This pricing is like a sword over the neck and drops when you screwup or the sql planner screws up.

samlambert2• 4 years ago

First of all, I agree there are gotchas. We have roadmap items that will eliminate this problem in the medium term.

I do however disagree that this is any worse than idle RDS hosts sitting around when you have no traffic, costing you huge sums for a service that is basically `apt-get install mysql-server` on top of EC2.

res0nat0r• 4 years ago

DynamoDB is the same, it charges you for the number of reads/writes you do, so if you're doing full table scans on massive databases, you're going to have a bad time.

fabian2k2• 4 years ago

I still don't see how this pricing model is usable in a database with a query planner. The user is not in control over the query plan, the database is. This is a recipe for disaster, and I'd never feel comfortable with this. Even with good understanding of how the database works there is pretty much no way to ensure that the database doesn't do some suprising full table scans.

mirntyfirty• 4 years ago

True, even with tuned indices table scans are pretty frequent and perhaps one would want a slower but cheaper query. It’d be quite stressful to have to worry about query plans executed because they can vary quite a bit across very similar queries and be nudged towards more expensive queries by development teams.

dasil003• 4 years ago

Many young founders won't have the experience or the patience to really understand this, and in practice most won't have the scale to really feel the pain anyway. The ones that do will be worth so much they can negotiate custom contracts. Such is the market for pickaxes created by easy VC money.

rockwotj• 4 years ago

This is why Google Cloud Firestore/Data store charges for rows returned, but the caveat is you can't do stuff like aggregations as the cost just doesn't work out

pjscott• 4 years ago

My big problem with SQL is that I want to do the query planning. Sure, the database can often do a better job -- but I want to be able to guarantee upper bounds on things, damn it! I've seen so many weird edge-case performance problems that boiled down to poor query plans. Things will be fast most of the time and then, suddenly, the database will look at its stats and decide to do a full table scan, and then everything goes straight to hell and stays there for too many milliseconds.

If I ever cross paths with a database, I'll spit on its shadow.

atombender• 4 years ago

They're not alone in this approach. BigQuery and DynamoDB also meter data usage based on the amount of data processed during a query.

orf2• 4 years ago

Athena as well

mike_d• 4 years ago

BigQuery allows you to specify maximum billed bytes for a query to avoid situations like this. You can also purchase slots for fixed cost unlimited queries.

jzelinskie• 4 years ago

Authzed[0] also does somewhat similar with SpiceDB[1], but charges based on query complexity for the levels of nesting in the graph traversal, rather than the actual number of rows affect. A flat query is easy to compute, thus cheap.

[0] https://authzed.com/pricing

[1] https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

abd12• 4 years ago

One difference with DynamoDB is that there's no query planner, so you can have a pretty good sense of how many items you'll hit and how big that read is.

chillycurve• 4 years ago

Database reads/writes are really hard (read: impossible) to predict unless you are already in production. Leading to thoughts like: "1 Billion reads!! I'll never use that much..." Once you cross the line, the overages kick in.

That being said, this does appear to be absurdly cheap compared to competitors. Amazon Aurora appears to be sitting at around $200 a month for 1 billion reads, excluding writes/transfer/storage/etc.

CockroachDB Serverless includes 250M "request units" (request units include reads and writes and individual requests can costs multiple units depending on size). They charge an extra $1 per month per 10M "request units," so $75 to get to 1B reads at least.

Am I missing something? What's the catch?

throwusawayus5• 4 years ago

You're mixing up I/O-based pricing with rows-based pricing. Aurora is priced based on I/O operations, with 16KB pages: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/

If you're doing a range scan query and your rows are reasonably-sized, you can conceivably get tens of rows to maybe even a few hundred rows per single I/O operation. Or even 0 I/O operations if the pages are already in memory in the buffer pool cache.

Planetscale prices based on rows.. And scanning a few FAQs I don't see anything about cached rows being free, but maybe i missed it.

truetraveller5• 4 years ago

The pricing page/docs leaves so many questions unanswered:

-What's the cost of egress?

-What is a read/write exactly? It is a DB "page" read/write? I know there's a section on this, but it doesn't explain details.

-If it's a page read/write, what is the size of the page? 16kb?

-If it's a real row read/write, what is the maximum size? Can I write a 100mb row for the same price?

-What about indexes, or merging the WAL log? Will I be charged for these operations (can result in million+ writes)?

-What about small consecutive writes that fit in a single 16kb page, do I get charged a single write "unit"? RDS actually combines this into a single op (see IOPS with RDS).

-What about cached reads, do I get charged for that?

-What about computationally expensive queries, that do not actually read/write that much?

Please answer these questions. Provide useful real-world pricing examples. This is standard stuff, and especially important if "transparent" pricing is a key feature.

LewisJEllis5• 4 years ago

You come off as quite demanding and expectant for apparently not having read their pricing page or billing docs, which specify very clearly that they're talking about row reads/writes.

They even go into examples with using `EXPLAIN`, `EXPLAIN ANALYZE`, `innodb_rows_read`, etc to see row counts.

https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing

throwusawayus5• 4 years ago

Disagree, GP's expectations are perfectly reasonable

Their pricing page starts out by saying "Transparent pricing you can understand"! I shouldn't have to read a several thousand word FAQ, and then still come away wondering if cached pages still count as rows read

Cached page reads are free on Aurora, this makes a huge difference in pricing if it isn't the case on planetscale

truetraveller5• 4 years ago

I'm not demanding. If "transparent" pricing is a key feature, then please at least provide detailed billing info/examples. From the billing page you linked, still have many questions: If I have a row that's 100mb, is that counted as one read? What about index creation, is that counted? Or, merging the WAL log with the base, is that free? And what is a read "unit"? is this different than a "row read".

gigatexal2• 4 years ago

Maybe the FAQs will go into more detail.

truetraveller5• 4 years ago

They don't!

ignoramous2• 4 years ago

If there's no egress, Planet Scale would make for a pretty neat blob cache store (key -> blob queries) to front S3 for hot objects... 100b reads per month with S3 would cost $40K+ for just GET requests (discounting egress): https://archive.is/4HYH6

temuze• 4 years ago

Think of it, billions of `0000-00-00 00:00:00`s!

mxstbr• 4 years ago

This is similar to the problem we face, where you're charging based on usage of something people don't usually count. For us, that's GraphQL requests.

While certainly big companies have monitoring for this kind of thing set up, we learned that a majority of engineering teams have absolutely no clue how many GraphQL requests they get per month. Like, not even a ballpark. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Billions? No clue, could be any of those.

Our free plan was originally 5M free requests per month, which is relatively generous — but people didn't know and thus we had almost no users on the free plan. We recently changed it to just be "free for solo developers working on side projects / indie hacking / etc. no matter how many requests".[0]

So far, the change's been well received! Curious to see Planetscale dealing with the same general kind of issue, just on a different layer.

[0] https://graphcdn.io/blog/unlimited-free-requests-for-develop...

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

It’s because it makes zero sense for me to care about how many requests I send when I have my own server.

The limit is basically 31 x 24 x 3600 x [req per second server can handle]

Even at a relatively low rate of 10rps that is 26M requests per month.

Now putting a demo environment at 2 rps per second for a whole month is pretty generous, but until I took the time to calculate it, it sounded like a pretty bad value proposition to me (even though I probably make less than 1000 requests per day).

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

Well this is some nice news! From what I've seen from my data usages I was going to fall well within the free tier /before/ this change and now I've got even more headroom. I've been switching over to PlanetScale from Aurora Serverless and I'm really enjoying the experience so far and the savings are great too (1 instance costs about $40/mo, I have my dev/qa environments turn off after 5 minutes of no activity so they are almost free but prod has to stay on 24/7, now I'll pay $30/mo and that can take care of all 3 environments).

gigatexal2• 4 years ago

Look 200x more of something is 200x more, and 200x more for the same amount is a huge win for a service's users.

In the DB space though pricing per row or iop or this or that is tough. We're heavy users of BigQuery and the pricing per bytes consumed is tough, too, as you can't always rely on the estimator. But then if you go the fully pre-paid route like with something like Redshift you have high upfront fixed costs for an always on DB (that changed a bit with Redshift serverless -- currently in preview -- https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/redshift-serverless/) but I mean it's the same with BQ in that sense: don't run a query don't get charged except for stored data.

The point I am trying to make is that pricing of a DB is hard. If I had to choose I think I rather like the straight forward per second billing of serverless.

ignoramous2• 4 years ago

The answer really is do both kinds of pricing, like Cloudflare does with Workers.

Workers Bundled is priced for upto 50ms of CPU time and unlimited egress. Workers Unbound is priced per-ms of 8xCPU or 1xIO time, which ever is higher.

I mean, pricing is hard, but at least read through these if nothing else: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=inurl%3Ahbr.org%20...

StratusBen• 4 years ago

We wrote a blog post comparing RDS vs PlanetScale from a pricing perspective back in January...kudos to PlanetScale on responding to feedback on that so quickly. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29910812

We'll get the blog post updated but conceptually it seems like the "tipping point" of using PlanetScale vs RDS just got a lot easier at least from a read perspective - analysis is here: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/2022-01-12-rds-vs-planetscale-pr...

bachmeier• 4 years ago

Can anyone comment on PlanetScale vs Supabase? I'm not their target, because I'm just a random individual that wants a free database for personal projects. I could try both but would be nice to hear about someone's experience.

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

From my understanding Supabase is more of "all-in-one backend" whereas PlanetScale is "just" a DB (MySQL vs the Postgres it looks like you get on Supabase). PlanetScale also has some pretty awesome tools for moving DB schema changes between environments (zero downtime) and I don't know what Supabase provides for something like this. If all you want is a DB then give PS a try, I'm loving it so far, if you want a full backend "no code/low code"-firebase-like thing then Supabase might be for you. Personally I don't like going "all in" on something as important as "my whole backend", I'm much happier just getting a DB from PS and then using AWS Lambda as my "backend".

kiwicopple• 4 years ago

{supabase ceo}

This is true, we do offer some extra functionality - but also I want to point out that the database we provide is "just" Postgres. You can use it as a standalone database without any of the other functionality. We give "postgres level access", so you can use it just like RDS or any other DBaaS

for example, we commonly see Prisma developers using our databases (because we also provide pgbouncer, a connection pooler).

someelephant2• 4 years ago

If PlanetScale just offered to reimburse any costs above the 99th percentile of normal operations it would be a great success. If their business model is dependent on people getting screwed by costs above the 99th percentile then they shouldn't be in business.

ksec2• 4 years ago

I was going to say I agree but I dont see how that would work. How do you define normal operation?

sinkholed• 4 years ago

Vitess is a popular choice, a battle hardened current gen solution.

I'm keen for Spanner/CockroachDB!

kondro• 4 years ago

Just curious, how are indexes priced?

I assume you’ll pay $2.50/GB for storage, but if I update a row that touches 5 indexes is this 1 write or 6?

PlanetScale increases plans to include billions of reads

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