PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

https://planetscale.com/blog/5-dollar-planetscale

by ryanvogel • 9 months ago

233 165 9 months ago

htrp• 9 months ago

Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node

Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.

aquariusDue• 9 months ago

Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.

So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.

saxenaabhi2• 9 months ago

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.

[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...

[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata

samlambert28• 9 months ago

It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.

saxenaabhi2• 9 months ago

@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?

Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.

marcoglauser• 9 months ago

I'm honestly confused why local nvme disks haven't become the standard for cloud offerings a long time ago.

Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)

Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.

reducesuffering2• 9 months ago

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.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.

jszymborski• 9 months ago

A bit of unsolicited advice:

This post is the first time I've heard of your company and your blog post interested me.

When proprietors go to the mat in the comment section, I immediately lose any interest in patronizing them.

randomNumber7• 9 months ago

Why would a company squeeze customers after making them dependendent? Never heard of it.

Also what was capitalism again?

CryptoBanker3• 9 months ago

You currently make a small profit on cheaper tiers. Things change

carlm422• 9 months ago

(Planetscale employee) This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage

CryptoBanker3• 9 months ago

It's very similar in that it's not a huge source of revenue for Planetscale, so easy to pull the rug without disrupting revenue too much

koolala• 9 months ago

What other free thing did people switch to? Nothing good seems free anymore.

davidryal• 9 months ago

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

milindsoni201• 9 months ago

Stay away from them, You never know when they pull the rug

samlambert28• 9 months ago

pull the rug on what? a profitable product?

slig2• 9 months ago

How hard could it be to migrate away from $5/m worth of a managed PG?

rileymichael• 9 months ago

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..

amluto• 9 months ago

And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.

In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.

quadrature• 9 months ago

What does the durability story look like for this single node offering ?.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

data is still replicated safely from the single node which is also backed by EBS.

oulipo2• 9 months ago

Is it possible to install Timescale on those?

samlambert28• 9 months ago

we are working on the open source licensed version.

achristmascarl• 9 months ago

How much vCPU, memory, and storage will this have?

timenotwasted• 9 months ago

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.

khamidou• 9 months ago

btw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.

gpi• 9 months ago

Will it be planet scale still?

blorenz• 9 months ago

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.

jammo• 9 months ago

Really big impact! I'm not sure how fly or render work but if your compute instances are in $city make sure your planetscale instance is too. You shouldn't be far off 'in region aws' latency at the point.

outlore2• 9 months ago

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...

impulser_2• 9 months ago

Yeah, and they became an actual profitable tech company which is extremely rare today.

rajatkulk• 9 months ago

Um well, they shouldn't have done that. "If it means they go broke and need to shut down for me to keep having my free tier DB for 3 tables and 2 users, so be it, go broke"

bigyabai2• 9 months ago

Wanna say I heard someone defend Oracle with this line of logic, a while ago.

gdulli2• 9 months ago

Sounds horrible. Trying to think of another tech company that scaled down a free offering or laid off staff. Coming up empty.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

outlore2• 9 months ago

My apologies for sounding bitter.

You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.

I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all

trial3• 9 months ago

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for

cowthulhu• 9 months ago

Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.

infrawhispers• 9 months ago

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?

Imustaskforhelp6• 9 months ago

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...

This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.

Please, try to apologize to them if possible

I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is

Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)

This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.

Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.

I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.

Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing

Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card

Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it

Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really

Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.

I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.

I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really

overfeed• 9 months ago

people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.

Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.

Rug-pulls. Not even once.

zzmbnp3• 9 months ago

"Either way I don't care what you remember or think."

Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.

Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.

tw04• 9 months ago

I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future.

I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.

Gathering6678• 9 months ago

I honestly don't even know about your company before and the only thing I remember now about PlanetScale is the CEO telling HN readers to f off...

undefuser• 9 months ago

Can you share the Pepperidge Farm story?

radicalriddler2• 9 months ago

This is really good!

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.

radicalriddler2• 9 months ago

I notice that PlanetScale has a Developer Educator position available. Has anyone sent that to Aaron Francis yet? He might be interested.

jorisnoo• 9 months ago

I'm not sure returning to his previous job is his top priority right now.

ianhawes• 9 months ago

Imagine laying off one of the most genuine, friendly developer evangelists of all time.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

It was sad to say goodbye to Aaron yes. I am glad he and I are on good terms again. I have immense professional respect for him.

aarondf3• 9 months ago

Very nice of you to characterize me as such, I truly appreciate it.

copypaper• 9 months ago

Wow I didn't know he got laid off. I remember watching his videos a few years ago and absolutely loved his way of teaching. He's the reason I found out about PlanetScale to begin with.

Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...

aarondf3• 9 months ago

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.

The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw

c4pt0r• 9 months ago

well...Many database vendors offers free databases for dev purpose for years, i mean it's not a news.

Imustaskforhelp6• 9 months ago

I mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.

Nathanba• 9 months ago

Sadly they don't mention that this will come to MySQL/vitess as well, it makes it look like Postgres is thing they care about now as a company.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

This is not true. All of our Vitess operations assume 3 node clusters. It's a lot of work to change (we have hundreds of thousands of nodes). For Postgres it was a lot simpler to do based on the architecture. There are equally good things coming for Vitess it's just for a slightly different audience.

nl• 9 months ago

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.

ksec5• 9 months ago

Sounds exactly like real world politics. I thought people are waking up to if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. And free is perhaps the most expensive thing. Turns out no.

andreybaskov2• 9 months ago

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.

andrenotgiant• 9 months ago

didn't help that they called it "Free forever" before taking it away. Lesson learned

ksec5• 9 months ago

I only remember it was called "Hobby" Plan.

andreybaskov2• 9 months ago

understandable, but again, "forever" as in heat death of the universe? Sadly there is no such thing as forever either.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

we never said that

eskibars2• 9 months ago

So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.

The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.

But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.

Imustaskforhelp6• 9 months ago

If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...

I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people

samlambert28• 9 months ago

Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?

I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.

zzmbnp3• 9 months ago

More surprising is what a jerk the CEO of PlanetScale is. He's on Twitter being nasty at everyone and everything. The guy is toxic as hell.

He posted this:

"I would like to thank the haters for helping me promote the new PlanetScale $5 plan all day. Thanks guys."

Scorching his reputation on Hacker News is a real 400 IQ movie for a cloud database company CEO.

crossroadsguy• 9 months ago

So it’s important to point out when a company still engages in such practices.

nromiun• 9 months ago

So? Maybe don't offer a free tier if you can't sustain it? And many other providers (like Neon, Koyeb, Supabase etc) still offer a free tier. Personally I don't like this type of bait and switch. If you can't sustain something don't offer it in the first place. Same with open source projects going closed source for money after getting free work from open source programmers.

cess113• 9 months ago

Many of us grew up on stuff like SDF/Freeshell and IRC and ad-supported web hosts. "Free forever" actually meant "free forever" to us, until services that used the same language to make promises ripped us off and turned us more cynical.

pjc50• 9 months ago

Indeed. I'm a user of Cloudflare free and Oracle(tm) Always Free(sic) services, but for hobby projects where I'm not under the illusion that they owe me anything.

I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.

lateforwork2• 9 months ago

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.

[1] https://neon.com

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2• 9 months ago

This allows Neon to scale compute to zero

It sure does scale to zero alright...

JustSkyfall• 9 months ago

They’re pretty infamous for having constant outages and downtime, wouldn’t recommend for something serious

lateforwork2• 9 months ago

I am yet to experience an outage, and I have been using for several months.

joshstrange• 9 months ago

I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen but I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and never experienced it. To be fair, my traffic patterns could just not overlap with their outages but wanted to add a data point.

impulser_2• 9 months ago

What allows them to offer a free tier is that they are ok with burning and losing money not because of how they built their service.

Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.

Animats• 9 months ago

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.

ksec5• 9 months ago

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.

samlambert28• 9 months ago

Hey ksec, you are right vitess is more expensive to run naturally. Do you host your apps in hertzer or is it a factor of cost? if you email me sam@planetscale.com i can give you free credits for either Vitess or Postgres.

ksec5• 9 months ago

Hi Sam. Thank You for the kind offers. But I will happily pay for the great product and services to support you guys. Just keep up the great work.

Imustaskforhelp6• 9 months ago

For context: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45339279) (which basically asked if using supabase's free tier and then migrating to planetscale when needing the scale)

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?

samlambert28• 9 months ago

I don't buy that someone commenting "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..." is trying to help me. It's naive to always assume good intentions, it allows people to be rude. Postgres is open source, we operate postgres really well at a price it's a super fair exchange of value imo.

tabemonooo• 9 months ago

"Free forever for hobby use"

thepaulmcbride• 9 months ago

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.

lopitoff• 9 months ago

I want to like it too.

Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?

You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.

You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.

port11• 9 months ago

We've paid for Scaleway's managed Postgres for almost 4 years at my previous startup. Small businesses don't always want to be managing a database.

xexr• 8 months ago

Completely agree with your sentiment.

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.

pixel_popping• 9 months ago

Love the design! It feels like browsing on MD files.

prakashn27• 9 months ago

i onboarded on planetscale when it was in free tier. Then they charged 40$.

Last year they increase the pricing again.

they attract users and increase the pricing. that is the game here.

PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

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