[HN Gopher] Bunny Database
___________________________________________________________________
Bunny Database
Author : dabinat
Score : 230 points
Date : 2026-02-03 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bunny.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bunny.net)
| pier25 wrote:
| Pretty cool. I've been using Bunny as a Cloudflare replacement
| for a couple of years and my experience has been flawless.
| jsheard wrote:
| It does feel like they're spreading their resources pretty thin
| though, the S3-compatible interface for their file storage has
| been "coming soon" since 2022.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I, too, have the same worry.
| pier25 wrote:
| Yeah that's true. The lack of S3 compat hasn't been an issue
| for me personally but it would be nice to have it for their
| edge storage.
| pousada wrote:
| That's the problem with keeping a public roadmap - in the end
| everyone is unhappy and also not really more informed
| notrab wrote:
| S3 is currently in closed preview with some users. It's quite
| easy to get added for those keen to try it. More using it and
| providing feedback, the quicker it'll become public preview.
| cobertos wrote:
| Huh, how? Did you have to modify your site a lot to do switch?
|
| I tried to test it out as a CDN replacement for Cloudflare but
| the workflow was a lot different. Instead of just using DNS to
| put it in front of another website and proxy the requests (the
| "orange cloud" button), I had to upload all the assets to Bunny
| and then rewrite the URLs in my app. Was kind of a pain
| pier25 wrote:
| They do have the CDN proxy too. Not sure when it was
| implemented though.
|
| It's a similar process to Cloudflare. Point the NS to them
| and enable the proxy for a domain or subdomain.
| jsheard wrote:
| You can also create a standalone pull zone and point your
| existing DNS provider to the CNAME they give you.
|
| (don't use CNAME flattening with DNS-routed CDNs like Bunny
| though, if you must use an apex domain then use the CDNs
| integrated nameservers)
| cuu508 wrote:
| > don't use CNAME flattening with DNS-routed CDNs like
| Bunny though
|
| What is the problem with doing that?
| osener wrote:
| When I tried it last year, their edge compute infra was
| just not there yet. It could not do any meaningful server-
| side rendering because of code size, compute and JS
| standard constraints.
|
| Has this situation changed?
| pier25 wrote:
| Not sure what you mean with ssr for a CDN?
| no_wizard wrote:
| Edge computing. Cloudflare workers for example.
|
| Bunny has a similarity concept: https://bunny.net/edge-
| scripting/
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I haven't tried to do SSR in bunny but they also have
| bunny magic containers now where you run an entire
| container instead of just edge scripts (but still at the
| edge).
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Depending on your precise requirements, I think it might
| have changed.
|
| I've been trying out Bunny recently and it looks like a
| very viable replacement for most things I currently do
| with Cloudflare. This new database fills one of the major
| gaps.
|
| Their edge scripting is based on Deno, and I think is
| pretty comparable to e.g. Vercel. They also have "magic
| containers", comparable to AWS ECS but (I think) much
| more convenient. It sounds from the docs like they run
| containers close to the edge, but I don't know if it's
| comparable to e.g. Lambda@Edge.
| Daegalus wrote:
| I have been using them for over a year. THey have the same
| flow as Cloudflare, point domain to thier CDN, set CDN Pull
| Zone to target your server. I havent had to do anything.
|
| They even support websockets.
|
| Why they cant do is the TUnnel stuff, or at least fake it. I
| have ipv6 servers, and I can't have the IPv4 Bunny traffic go
| to the ipv6 only sources.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Amazing. I had not noticed they support websockets now.
| That was always what I missed from CF.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| It should work as a drop in. You can just proxy your website.
| You don't need to upload anything to Bunny (but you can if
| you want).
| ForHackernews wrote:
| This sounds a lot like https://turso.tech/ ? Unless I
| misunderstand, they're both pitching SQLite-for-the-cloud.
| Squarex wrote:
| Yes, they mention they use libsql. Don't know why I should use
| them and not the product by the actual libsql authors.
| pier25 wrote:
| An advantage is the integration with other Bunny services
| like containers etc.
|
| Also, not sure about now, but historically Turso didn't have
| to best uptime.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| Some European companies migrate their dependencies from US
| clouds to European ones. Turso is registered in Delaware.
| Bunny HQ is in Slovenia. Different data related policies
| apply.
| o_m wrote:
| Bunny has their own infra while Turso relies on a cloud
| provider (AWS) which is unfortunately a no-go for many
| European companies
| 4star3star wrote:
| Why choose this over Cloudflare D1?
| nickorlow wrote:
| Not a technical reason, but given Cloudflare's recent business
| practices where they hold you hostage if you don't upgrade to
| an enterprise plan are a pretty good reason to avoid imo.
| jsheard wrote:
| For one they're EU-based, which may be a selling point if
| you're inclined to divest from US tech when possible.
| pier25 wrote:
| Cloudflare IPs might not work in Spain during football matches
| :)
|
| It looks like there might be issues in Italy too.
| benjymo wrote:
| Some ISPs have bad peering with Cloudflare (e.g. Deutsche
| Telekom). Not Cloudflares fault but it makes it a bad choice if
| your customers are in Germany.
|
| And Cloudflare is an american company.
| amelius wrote:
| Good question, the cloudflare speedtest has a bunny in it.
| Nnnes wrote:
| Disclaimer: I have not used either product; I _have_ used a
| number of Cloudflare 's (mostly free tier) offerings.
|
| In addition to the other points brought up, it looks like
| pricing strongly favors Bunny once you're outside of
| Cloudflare's free tier.
|
| Per billion rows read: Bunny $0.30, Cloudflare $1.00 (first
| 25B/month free)
|
| Per million rows written: Bunny $0.30, Cloudflare $1.00 (first
| 50M/month free)
|
| Per GB stored: Bunny $0.10/region, Cloudflare $0.75 (5GB free)
|
| Bunny also has a lot better region selection, 41 available vs.
| Cloudflare's 6 (see
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/configuration/data-
| loca...). Even though Bunny charges storage per region used
| where Cloudflare doesn't, Bunny still comes out cheaper with 7
| regions selected. Bunny lets you choose how many and which
| regions to replicate across; Cloudflare's region replication is
| an on/off toggle that is in beta and requires you to use "the
| new Sessions API" (I don't know what this entails).
|
| The main reason I haven't tried out D1 is that it locks you
| into using Workers to access the database. Bunny says they have
| an HTTP API.
|
| I plan to stick with VPSes for compute and storage, but I do
| like seeing someone (other than Amazon) challenge Cloudflare on
| their huge array of fun toys for devs to play with.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| It's not an american company.
| dabinat wrote:
| Small companies often have much better technical support than
| large companies where you just get lost in the system. One of
| the reasons I moved away from R2 was that it was impossible to
| contact anyone about the serious issues I had with the product.
| I'm using Bunny for CDN and have found them to be very
| responsive.
| bvogelzang wrote:
| Pricing Details: While in public preview, Bunny
| Database is free. When idle, Bunny Database only
| incurs storage costs. One primary region is charged continuously,
| while read replicas only add storage costs when serving traffic
| (metered by the hour). Reads - $0.30 per billion rows
| Writes - $0.30 per million rows Storage - $0.10 per GB per
| active region (monthly)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The best thing about their pricing is that you can prepay. So
| if you have a runaway cost, it can stop before you run up a 5
| or 6 figure bill, unlike Azure/AWS/GCP/CF.
| miyuru wrote:
| Their CDN has a minimum $1 charge.
|
| I was testing IPv6 origin support (they don't support it),
| and they billed me $2 for a couple of test requests. I was
| testing at the end of the month.
|
| With other providers, this would have cost only a few cents.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| That sounds concerning but I wouldn't use other providers
| anyway which can decide to charge me 5-6 figures due to
| user error or hacked account.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Is this good for write heavy loads or does it face the same
| constraints as regular SQLite?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Why couldn't they just use SQLite, and not libSQL?
| chungy wrote:
| LibSQL doesn't look anywhere close to active enough to consider
| it for production IMO.
|
| Just compare the most recent commits from LibSQL:
| https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/commits/main/
|
| To those of SQLite: https://sqlite.org/src/timeline
|
| One of these looks like a healthy and actively maintained
| project. The other isn't quite dead, but it's limping along.
| zackify wrote:
| why this over turso or litestream + read replicas?
| drmajormccheese wrote:
| This is not a database of bunnies
| sockaddr wrote:
| That's the only reason that I clicked.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Especially after httpstatus.cat and the animal game the other
| day.
|
| I've been had :(
| m4200 wrote:
| Accurate, but missing required punctuation of at least 1
| grawlix of length 4 and 2 interrobangs
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Seconded
| CalRobert wrote:
| I hear one of them owes money all over town.
| abanana wrote:
| But at least the bunny eating a cookie is cute.
| mchusma wrote:
| I have used multiple s3 and cdn replacements, and bunny is my
| favorite. Excited to see a database product in the mix.
| gordonhart wrote:
| Same, it's nice to use a no-BS CDN for personal projects (e.g.
| https://atlasof.space/). Their pricing is good and I actually
| appreciate that they have no free tier so that there's no "oh
| shit" moment when you suddenly exceed it and owe real $$$
| (looking at you, Netlify). I probably won't use their database
| feature but I'll for sure keep using their CDN if they can keep
| things as straightforward as they currently are.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It seems Bunny is competing with Cloudflare. They offer very
| similar services including CDN, video streaming, databases etc.
| endymion-light wrote:
| Looks cool, I need an alternative to my supabase set-up for
| little web tools, so i'll check it out!
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Not every project needs Postgres, and that's okay. Sometimes
| you just want a simple, reliable database that you can spin up
| quickly and build on, without worrying it'll hit your wallet like
| an EC2.
|
| Isn't the operational burden of SQLite the main selling point
| over Postgres (not one I subscribe to, but that's neither here
| nor there)? If it's managed, why do I care if it's SQLite or
| Postgres? If anything, I would expect Postgres to be the
| friendlier option, since you won't have to worry about eventually
| discovering that you actually need some feature even if you don't
| need it at the start of your project. Maybe there are projects
| that implement SQLite on top of Postgres so you can gradually
| migrate away from SQLite if you need Postgres features
| eventually?
| m_nalikowski wrote:
| Marek here from bunny.net. We're not saying SQLite is
| universally better than Postgres. The trade-off we're
| optimizing for is cost model and operational simplicity.
|
| Even as a managed service, Postgres DBaaS still tends to push
| users into capacity planning, instance tiers, and paying for
| idle headroom. Using a SQLite-compatible engine lets us offer a
| truly usage-based model with affordable read replication and
| minimal idle costs.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Bun alert!
| grugdev42 wrote:
| Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it
| REALLY to manage a RDBMS?
|
| Any Linux distro can have MySQL or Postgres installed in less
| than five minutes and works out of the box
|
| Even a single core VPS can handle lots of queries per second
| (assuming the tables are indexed properly and the queries aren't
| trash)
|
| There are mature open source backup solutions which don't require
| DB downtime (also available in most package managers)
|
| It's trivial to tune a DB using .conf files (there are even
| scripts that autotune for you!!!)
|
| Your VPS provider will allow you to configure encryption at rest,
| firewall rules, and whole disk snapshots as well
|
| And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're super
| reliable and stable
|
| Plus you have very stable costs each month
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Look into the capabilities of what I consider the leading edge
| of open source RDBMS managed solutions, Yugabyte:
| https://www.yugabyte.com
|
| And tell me how easily you can achieve this "out of the box"
|
| If you don't care about business continuity or high
| availability then everything gets easier
|
| > And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're
| super reliable and stable
|
| The box they're on goes down
| senko wrote:
| > The box they're on goes down
|
| So? Not everyone needs 99.999999% availability.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| And some do, so what's your point?
| senko wrote:
| Read the entire thread to find out.
| stanmancan wrote:
| The vast majority of products with paying customers need
| better availability than "database went down on Friday and
| I was AFK until Monday, sorry for the 3 day downtime
| everyone"
| senko wrote:
| If you're offering a hosted service, I've got bad news
| for you.
|
| Serverless, managed databases and even multicloud won't
| save you. You'll still have to be on call.
|
| Don't want to be on call? Design your stuff so it works
| local first.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Local first stuff can also break, so that's not a
| foolproof plan.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| > If you don't care about business continuity or high
| availability then everything gets easier
| arielcostas wrote:
| It's not about it being hard, it's about delegating. Many
| companies are a bit less sensitive to pricing and would rather
| pay monthly for someone else to keep their database up, rather
| than spending engineering hours on setting up a database,
| tuning it, updating it, checking its backups, monitoring it and
| making it scale if needed.
|
| Sure, any regular SME can just install Postgres or MySQL
| without even setting much up except with
| `mysql_secure_install`, a user with a password and an 'app'
| database. But you may end up with 10-20 database installs you
| need to back up, patch and so on every once in a while. And
| companies value that.
| jama211 wrote:
| Or at least they should. I've worked many places where
| thousands of dollars in engineering hours were wasted on
| something after they refused to use a service for a fraction
| of the cost. Some companies understand this but others don't.
| no_wizard wrote:
| On the pricing bit, I have to say edge driven SQLite/ libsql
| driven solutions (this is a lot of them) can be a mixed bag.
|
| Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty
| reasonably priced, given the global coverage.
|
| AWS with Aurora is more expensive for sure and isn't edge
| located if I recall correctly, so you don't get near instant
| propagation of changes on the edge
|
| The bigger thing for me is how much control you have. So far
| with these edge database providers you don't have a ton of
| say in how things are structured. To use them optimally, I
| have found it works best if you are doing database-per-tenant
| (or customer) scenarios or using it as a read / write cache
| that gets exfiltrated asynchronously.
|
| And that is where I believe the real cost factors come into
| play is the flexibility
| nicoburns wrote:
| I would have no concerns around reliability uptime running my
| own database.
|
| I would have concerns around backups (ensuring that your
| backups are actually working, secure, and reliable seems like
| potentially time intensive ongoing work).
|
| I also don't think I fully understand what is required in terms
| of security. Do I now have to keep track of CVEs, and work out
| what actions I need to in response to each one? You talk about
| firewall rules. I don't know what is required here either.
|
| I'm sure it's not too hard to hire someone who does know how to
| do these things, but probably not for anything close to the
| $50/month or whatever it costs to run a hosted database.
| trvz wrote:
| As for the CVEs: you just need to install from your OS's
| package manager and run periodic updates. The communities
| take care of this very well.
| pier25 wrote:
| One instance maybe but multi regional?
| lateforwork wrote:
| > _Maybe I 'm not the target market for this, but how hard is
| it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?_
|
| It is not. You can provision a free Postgres instance with a
| single click: https://neon.new/
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Yes, but there is nothing about pricing on this page. That
| doesn't make sense to me.
| lateforwork wrote:
| Neon is from Databricks. Here's their pricing page:
| https://neon.com/pricing
| written-beyond wrote:
| Backups are a PITA I wanted to go exactly this route but even
| though I had VMs and compute I can't let any production data
| hit it without bullet proof backups.
|
| I setup a cron job to store my backups to object storage but
| everything felt very fragile because if any detail in the chain
| was misconfigured I'd basically have a broken production
| database. I'd have to watch the database constantly or setup
| alerts and notifications.
|
| If there is a ready to go OSS postgres with backups configured
| you can deploy I'd happily pay them for that.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it
| REALLY to manage a RDBMS?
|
| It depends:
|
| - do you want multi region presence
|
| - do you want snapshot backups
|
| - do you want automated replication
|
| - do you want transparent failover
|
| - do you want load balancing of queries
|
| - do you want online schema migrations with millisecond lock
| time
|
| - do you want easy reverts in time
|
| - do you want minor versions automatically managed
|
| - do you want the auth integrated with a different existing
| system
|
| - do you want...
|
| There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give
| you. You can do everything on the list yourself of course, but
| it will take time and unless you already have experience, every
| point can introduce some failure you're not aware of.
| themafia wrote:
| > Any Linux distro
|
| What is the upgrade path?
|
| How often do they release?
|
| Do I have to worry about CVEs?
|
| Who is doing network security?
|
| Who is testing that security?
|
| Where are my credentials stored?
|
| Do I have a dashboard that tracks the hundreds of resources I'm
| responsible for including this new one?
|
| > Plus you have very stable costs each month
|
| I'm sick and tired of managing linux boxes. It simply doesn't
| scale in any reasonable way.
| cschmatzler wrote:
| fwiw, Bunny are the people that announced S3 compatibility for
| their object storage in Q2 2022 [1]
|
| > We can't wait to have this available as a preview later in Q2
| and truly make global storage a breeze, so keep an eye out!
|
| then apologised for missing that in September 2023 [2]
|
| > We initially announced that we were working on S3 support for
| Bunny Storage all the way back in 2022. Today, as 2023 is slowly
| coming to an end, many of our customers continue to follow our
| blog, hoping for good news about the release.
|
| changing the roadmap to early 2024 [2]
|
| > But we are working aggressively toward shipping S3
| compatibility in early 2024.
|
| That same post also has the beautiful "At bunny.net, we value
| transparency." quote. It's early 2026, and they're literally
| ignoring my support requests asking about what the roadmap is
| looking like for this now.
|
| So, do not trust their product or leadership at all.
|
| [1] https://bunny.net/blog/introducing-edge-storage-sftp-
| support... [2] https://bunny.net/blog/whats-happening-
| with-s3-compatibility...
| fspoettel wrote:
| Yeah I'm in the same boat. I was pretty excited to bring stuff
| over from Cloudflare but the missing S3 compat. and the
| communication around that was (and still is) a dealbreaker for
| me.
| gsanderson wrote:
| I'd like it too. The new docs do refer to it e.g:
|
| > When S3 compatibility is enabled (currently in beta), the
| number of available replication points is reduced
|
| I assume it's a private beta.
|
| https://docs.bunny.net/storage/storage-
| tiers#s3-compatibilit...
| fspoettel wrote:
| It indeed is. Support answer:
|
| > This feature is currently in the closed beta stage. It is
| not available for use currently, but it's expected to be in
| the near future. We appreciate your interest in it and will
| mark your ticket so we can notify you when it's available.
| dagss wrote:
| Why do you want to move from Cloudflare?
|
| Asking because I was looking at both Cloudflare and Bunny
| literally this week...and I feel like I don't know anything
| about it. Googling for it, with "hackernews" as keyword to
| avoid all the blogspam, didn't bring up all that much.
|
| (I ended up with Cloudflare and am sure that for my purposes
| it doesn't matter at all which I choose.)
| fspoettel wrote:
| A couple of reasons:
|
| - The free CDN is basically unusable with my ISP Telekom
| Germany due to a long-running and well documented peering
| dispute. This is not necessarily an issue with Cloudflare
| itself, but means that I have to pay for the Pro plan for
| every domain if I want to have a functioning site in my
| home country. The $25 per domain / project add up.
|
| - Cloudflare recently had repeated, long outages that took
| down my projects for hours at a time.
|
| - Their database offering (D1) had some unpredictable
| latency spikes that I never managed to fully track down.
|
| - As a European, I'm trying to minimize the money I spent
| on US cloud services and am actively looking for European
| alternatives.
| tpetry wrote:
| You don't have to get the Pro plan to solve the Deutsche
| Telekom issues. You can also use their Argo product for
| $5/month - but only makes sense if your egress costs
| wouldn't exceed the pro plans pricing.
| js4ever wrote:
| Pro plan without argo give you better peering on
| Cloudflare?
| DonnyV wrote:
| You left out the part where they realized they couldn't ship S3
| compatibility without rebuilding their storage service. So they
| have decided to rebuild their storage service. Not really a
| small project. So I can see how its taking longer. At least
| they were transparent about it.
| kawsper wrote:
| I've been struggling with Bunny the last couple of days.
|
| Their log delivery api is delayed by over 3 days, despite them
| promising only "up to 5 minutes delay" in their docs:
| https://docs.bunny.net/cdn/logging
|
| Why isn't it on the status page you might ask? Oh, that's because
| a delay is not "critical", but I fear I am losing loglines now,
| their retention is 3 days.
|
| It's an interesting strategy for them, because it doesn't inspire
| confidence in me about their other offerings. When they can't
| reliably operate a log delivery API or be transparent about
| issues, it's hard to trust them with something as critical as a
| database.
| davidcann wrote:
| I'm seeing log delays too the past couple of days... something
| like 14 hours, in my case.
| Havoc wrote:
| Will give this a spin. They're one of the few cloud-y providers
| that has both prepayment and a rate limiter that doesn't charge
| for rate limit exceeds (still blows my mind that providers charge
| for blocks).
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Adding my voice to the chorus here: they've established a pattern
| of introducing new features and never really getting them past
| the 80% point. No qualms with the CDN; it's a sweet spot among
| providers. But their other offerings have been frustrating me for
| years now.
| tpetry wrote:
| Can you share some anecdotes?
| ftchd wrote:
| we have 3 orange clouds now
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Managed sqlite?
| kerblang wrote:
| Is this supposed to be a distributed DB that auto-synchronizes
| instances? Documentation doesn't seem to say anything about that.
|
| If not, it seems like it would be quite a bit of work to
| implement the synchronization... and I don't understand why one
| would use it otherwise.
| jorams wrote:
| This documentation page[1] seems pretty clear. One primary at a
| time, any number of read replicas that automatically proxy
| writes to the primary, when compute scales to zero the data is
| in object storage and a new primary can spin up elsewhere.
|
| [1]: https://docs.bunny.net/database/replication
| turtlebits wrote:
| FYI, this is based on libSQL which has pretty poor driver support
| (Python still experimental).
| deepsun wrote:
| Reminds me of how we got scarred by "parse.com" -- it was also a
| promising database, and our customer insisted on it, but after
| lengthy development and just before our project release turned
| out that they are shutting down and noone works on it anymore.
| Like literally their support said "uhm sorry folks, we're all
| hired by Facebook, no one is working on parse.com anymore".
| jeromechoo wrote:
| parse.com was my last straw building on "as a service" startups
| because of this. DaaS is not even particularly good for hobby
| projects anymore given how easy it is to work with sqlite.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| Main positive with bunny.net:
|
| Its European rather than from USA so its less dependent on that
| orange guy in that white/golden house
| horatius26 wrote:
| I thought this would be a database of bunnies. My disappointment
| cannot be overstated.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The "Wait, what does "SQLite-compatible" actually mean?"
| subheading didn't answer my question to be honest. They're using
| (forked) libSQL under the hood - ok, cool. But how do I interface
| with it?
|
| They don't elaborate, but apparently libSQL has an HTTP API
| called "Hrana":
| https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/blob/main/docs/HRANA... -
| if that's what they're exposing, wouldn't it make more sense to
| call it libSQL-compatible or something?
| fix4fun wrote:
| Yes, libSQL would fit better in that case. But all of it is
| marketing for better audience ;) (SQLite got x69 more searches
| than libSQL in Google).
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(page generated 2026-02-03 23:00 UTC)