[HN Gopher] RDS vs. PlanetScale: Pricing Considerations
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       RDS vs. PlanetScale: Pricing Considerations
        
       Author : samlambert
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2022-01-12 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.vantage.sh)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.vantage.sh)
        
       | wizwit999 wrote:
       | Interesting, a more direct comparison is probably Aurora and they
       | seem to have similar pricing.
        
         | StratusBen wrote:
         | Hey there - I'm the author of the post. It's a really good call
         | out and something we're thinking about as a future post in the
         | series.
         | 
         | When we took a look at RDS costs, the vast majority of
         | customers are using "raw" RDS. So the hope with doing this
         | analysis (which was definitely a bit trickier to do) was to try
         | and purposefully compare that with PlanetScale as that seems to
         | be the "true" customer anchor.
        
       | SomeCallMeTim wrote:
       | But...MySQL? Sigh...
       | 
       | I migrated to PostgreSQL later than most, and I've still be using
       | Postgres for six years...
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | Maybe I am being cynical here, but one advantage of AWS is that
       | when it goes down, the whole online world looks like it is on
       | fire.
       | 
       | So if you have a database on AWS, and AWS goes down, you likely
       | don't even need to tell your CEO that AWS is down, they already
       | probably know that from the news or because their favorite
       | website/app is also down.
       | 
       | However, if PlanetScale goes down, likely everything else appears
       | to be working except yours.
        
         | mayank wrote:
         | I don't think this is cynical, it's a restatement of the
         | "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage. Choosing PlanetScale
         | at this stage in its market penetration is almost certainly
         | going to be seen as the riskier business choice over RDS Aurora
         | (even though it's not quite apples:apples) or GCP Spanner
         | (which is). You can choose to spend your innovation token
         | there, but you better be prepared for the downside when
         | PlanetScale goes down and everything else is up.
        
           | WFHRenaissance wrote:
           | I love the Innovation Token blog post, but. it's been a while
           | since I've seen the OG post. Do you have a link?
        
             | alexjurkiewicz wrote:
             | http://boringtechnology.club/
        
           | NikolaeVarius wrote:
           | I have my problems with this statement mostly because IBM
           | actually does suck. The amount of products its bought and
           | promptly did a full thrust crash into the ground are many.
           | AWS has its problems but 99.99999% of the time the "core"
           | products perfectly fine, I dont know about its multitude of
           | side-hustles though.
        
             | kupopuffs wrote:
             | IBM used to be good
        
             | r_hoods_ghost wrote:
             | I think you're missing the context that the adage "nobody
             | gets fired for buying IBM" dates back to the 1970s at
             | least. It's not meant to refer to IBM as it is now, but
             | rather to IBM as it was then, an industrial behemoth with a
             | near monopoly on business machines, some of which happened
             | to be general purpose computers.
        
         | daenney wrote:
         | PlanetScale probably runs on AWS or GCP, so that's a solved
         | problem (:
        
       | orf wrote:
       | Cool, one poorly optimised query that scans a 500 million row
       | table will cost you 75$ for the scan alone. Assuming a 100gb
       | table that's an additional $125.
       | 
       | Per. Query.
        
         | samlambert wrote:
         | We have features coming that will make this not a problem for
         | people.
        
           | phoenix24 wrote:
           | is that feature called - automatic query optimization?
        
           | orf wrote:
           | Awesome! I like the idea of the product, but the pricing
           | structure is really really risky and makes it a hard sell. At
           | least with AWS the price is fixed instead of "possibly cheap
           | or possibly the most expensive thing you can ever imagine".
           | 
           | It's hard to know how you'd get rid of this problem: either
           | you block terrible queries (bad for services) or have some
           | price caps/forgiveness (bad for you).
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-12 23:01 UTC)