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PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- htrp 11mo agoGoing from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node
- oompydoompy74 11mo agoMost 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 11mo agoFunnily 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.
- ok_dad 11mo agoB&h photo video closes their order system on Jewish holidays in the NYC time zone. I often find myself saving items to order the next day on there.
- BoorishBears 11mo agoGovernment websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-during-business-hours/ https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri... (people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
- saxenaabhi 11mo agoI 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-benchmarks https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-... [2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata
- samlambert 11mo agoIt'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.
- saxenaabhi 11mo 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.
- samlambert 11mo agoyou have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
- marcoglauser 11mo agoI'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-plans 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.
- reducesuffering 11mo agoI 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.
- samlambert 11mo agoWhy 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 11mo agoA 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.
- samlambert 11mo agowhy is it going to the mat? i had to correct something that was untrue. 1.5 years is not very recently.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago1.5 years ago is recently IMO.
- reducesuffering 11mo agoCase in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago” If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
- milindsoni201 11mo agoStay away from them, You never know when they pull the rug
- samlambert 11mo agopull the rug on what? a profitable product?
- slig 11mo agoHow hard could it be to migrate away from $5/m worth of a managed PG?
- rileymichael 11mo agooh 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 11mo agoAnd 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 11mo agoWhat does the durability story look like for this single node offering ?.
- samlambert 11mo agodata is still replicated safely from the single node which is also backed by EBS.
- oulipo2 11mo agoIs it possible to install Timescale on those?
- samlambert 11mo agowe are working on the open source licensed version.
- rizky05 11mo ago[dead]
- achristmascarl 11mo agoHow much vCPU, memory, and storage will this have?
- timenotwasted 11mo agoThis 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 11mo agobtw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.
- gpi 11mo agoWill it be planet scale still?
- blorenz 11mo agoShould 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 11mo agoReally 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.
- outlore 11mo agoRemember 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_ 11mo agoYeah, and they became an actual profitable tech company which is extremely rare today.
- gdulli 11mo agoSounds horrible. Trying to think of another tech company that scaled down a free offering or laid off staff. Coming up empty.
- samlambert 11mo agoI 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.
- outlore 11mo agoMy 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
- radicalriddler 11mo agoThis is really good! After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
- radicalriddler 11mo agoI notice that PlanetScale has a Developer Educator position available. Has anyone sent that to Aaron Francis yet? He might be interested.
- jorisnoo 11mo agoI'm not sure returning to his previous job is his top priority right now.
- ianhawes 11mo agoImagine laying off one of the most genuine, friendly developer evangelists of all time.
- samlambert 11mo agoIt was sad to say goodbye to Aaron yes. I am glad he and I are on good terms again. I have immense professional respect for him.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- aarondf 11mo agoThank you Sam. For others, I wrote a longer response above!
- aarondf 11mo agoVery nice of you to characterize me as such, I truly appreciate it.
- copypaper 11mo agoWow I didn't know he got laid off. I remember watching his videos a few years ago and absolutely loved his way of teaching. He's the reason I found out about PlanetScale to begin with. Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
- c4pt0r 11mo agowell...Many database vendors offers free databases for dev purpose for years, i mean it's not a news.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo agoI mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.
- Nathanba 11mo agoSadly 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.
- samlambert 11mo agoThis 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 11mo agoI 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.
- ksec 11mo agoSounds 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.
- andreybaskov 11mo agoI'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 11mo agodidn't help that they called it "Free forever" before taking it away. Lesson learned
- ksec 11mo agoI only remember it was called "Hobby" Plan.
- andreybaskov 11mo agounderstandable, but again, "forever" as in heat death of the universe? Sadly there is no such thing as forever either.
- arthurcolle 11mo agoThen call it something else
- samlambert 11mo agowe did. we called it the Hobby plan. we never said forever.
- eskibars 11mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240124013352/https://planetscale.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20240124013352/https://planetsca... Says "free forever"
- 11mo ago
- lateforwork 11mo agoDatabricks 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 https://neon.com
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 11mo ago>This allows Neon to scale compute to zero It sure does scale to zero alright...
- JustSkyfall 11mo agoThey’re pretty infamous for having constant outages and downtime, wouldn’t recommend for something serious
- lateforwork 11mo agoI am yet to experience an outage, and I have been using for several months.
- joshstrange 11mo agoI’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_ 11mo agoWhat 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 11mo agoMost 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.
- ksec 11mo agoI 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.
- samlambert 11mo agoHey 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.
- ksec 11mo agoHi 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo agoFor context: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45339279 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?
- samlambert 11mo agoI 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 11mo ago"Free forever for hobby use"
- thepaulmcbride 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoWe'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.
- up2isomorphism 11mo ago[flagged]
- nromiun 11mo agoWhy are you pretending like Planetscale is the only database provider? There are a large number of db/web providers (even free ones like GCP, Neon, Supabase etc) between using Planetscale and hosting your own server.
- xexr 11mo agoCompletely 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 $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users. Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise. At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs". Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers. They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
- pixel_popping 11mo agoLove the design! It feels like browsing on MD files.
- prakashn27 11mo agoi onboarded on planetscale when it was in free tier. Then they charged 40$. Last year they increase the pricing again. they attract users and increase the pricing. that is the game here.