[HN Gopher] PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases
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PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases
Author : ryanvogel
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-10-30 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (planetscale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (planetscale.com)
| htrp wrote:
| Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at
| 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| B&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.
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| 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
| samlambert wrote:
| 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.
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| @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 wrote:
| you 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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.
| samlambert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| samlambert wrote:
| why is it going to the mat? i had to correct something that
| was untrue. 1.5 years is not very recently.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 1.5 years ago is recently IMO.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| I think it's great evening entertainment. Keep fanning the
| flames while I go make some popcorn!
| beoberha wrote:
| Sam is a great twitter follow
| samlambert wrote:
| thank you
| gdulli wrote:
| I know comments section drama is fun, but I'm not seeing it
| here and it feels like you're trying to create it from
| scratch.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Why would a company squeeze customers after making them
| dependendent? Never heard of it.
|
| Also what was capitalism again?
| samlambert wrote:
| the reason we make sure all our products are gross margin
| positive is so this doesn't have to happen.
| czl wrote:
| Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives
| are to push users into higher margin plans and from this
| pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan
| which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy
| users then imposing migration costs on these users when
| you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps
| grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new
| plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise
| you will not rug pull again.
| debo_ wrote:
| This is a lazy response.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| You _currently_ make a small profit on cheaper tiers. Things
| change
| carlm42 wrote:
| (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
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| 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
| samlambert wrote:
| this makes no sense to me
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of
| customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to
| do the same thing to a group of customers who make you
| 25% of your revenue.
|
| This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make
| Planetscale very much revenue.
| samlambert wrote:
| but its entry level pricing for customers that grow. it
| will be great for us. there is no point hurting our
| reputation and slowing growth.
| czl wrote:
| You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free
| plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan.
| Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why
| be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you
| in the future?
| slig wrote:
| It's not made to make money, but to funnel paid customers
| onto their platform.
| hennell wrote:
| In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers
| all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a
| month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a
| lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher
| than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less
| profitable option without price increases, which loses
| customers causing more increases because of none scalable
| costs etc.
|
| Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and
| it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller
| customers and focus on the big fish who make the real
| money.
|
| It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and
| while you might not see it being likely here right now,
| if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you
| need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a
| pretty valid concern.
| carlm42 wrote:
| Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a
| huge source of revenue _today_ , on a single customer
| basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our
| goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify
| larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build
| on and grow on our platform. We would never want to pull
| the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-)
| sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not
| the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way
| that's affordable to everyone. You of course don't have to
| take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do
| this and not pull the rug. Compare to a free tier where you
| bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying
| you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
| milindsoni201 wrote:
| Stay away from them, You never know when they pull the rug
| samlambert wrote:
| pull the rug on what? a profitable product?
| slig wrote:
| How hard could it be to migrate away from $5/m worth of a
| managed PG?
| rileymichael wrote:
| 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..
| quadrature wrote:
| What does the durability story look like for this single node
| offering ?.
| samlambert wrote:
| data is still replicated safely from the single node which is
| also backed by EBS.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Is it possible to install Timescale on those?
| samlambert wrote:
| we are working on the open source licensed version.
| achristmascarl wrote:
| How much vCPU, memory, and storage will this have?
| timenotwasted wrote:
| 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.
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