PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA
60 comments
·September 22, 2025ProofHouse
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ProofHouse
I mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar;
What is PlanetScale for Postgres?
Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.
theanirudh
We just migrated to PlanetScale Postgres Metal over the weekend. We are already seeing major query improvements. The migration was pretty smooth. Post-migration we hit a few issues (turned out it wasn't an issue with PlanetScale), and the PlanetScale team jumped in immediately to help us out, even on a Saturday morning so support's been amazing.
The Insights tab also surfaced missing indexes we added, which sped things up further. Early days, but so far so good.
benterix
Out of curiosity: how do you connect your databases to external services that are consuming these data? In places I do similar work, databases are usually in the same private network as the instances which are reading and writing data to them. If you put them somewhere on the internet, apart from security, doesn't it affect latency?
theanirudh
Their databases are hosted on AWS and GCP so latency isn't much of an issue. They also have AWS Private Link and if configured it won't go over the internet.
oefrha
PlanetScale runs in AWS/GCP, so not really “somewhere on the internet” if your workload is already there.
oefrha
Would you mind sharing what you were migrating from, and what kind of issues you ran into?
endorphine
Care to elaborate what kind of issues? Looking into migrating as well.
theanirudh
The issues weren't PlanetScale related. We use Hasura and when we did the cutover, we connected to the DB via PGBouncer and some features don't work right. Started seeing a lot of errors so paged them and they helped out. We were connecting directly to PG previously but when we cutover we missed that.
ProofHouse
appreciate you sharing
ritzaco
This seems to be mainly aimed at existing PlanetScale customers.
> To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in to your PlanetScale account, create a new database, and select Postgres.
It does mention the sign up option but doesn't really give me much context about pricing or what it is. I know a bit, but I get confused by different database offerings, so it seems like a missed opportunity to give me two more sentences of context and some basic pricing - what's the easiest way for me to try this if I'm curious?
On the pricing page I can start selecting regions and moving slides to create a plan from $39/month and up, but I couldn't easily find an answer to if there's a free trial or cheaper way to 'give it a spin' without committing.
intelekshual
PlanetScale (famously?) deprecated their free "Hobby" tier (plus fired their sales & marketing teams) back in 2024 to achieve profitability
dangoodmanUT
PlanetScale isnt' really designed for the "ill give it a go" casual customer that might use supabase
It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass
game_the0ry
I am not experienced enough to know the performance differences between planetscale and supabase, but...
> It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass
Could you elaborate what you meant by this for my education?
samlambert
Performance differences between PlanetScale and Supabase: https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/supabase
ritzaco
businesses that 'need to haul ass' usually still want to try something out before buying it. That doesn't need to a a free plan, but it's common to offer some trial period to new users.
Also totally OK if planetscale doesn't do this and that $39/month _is_ the best way to try them out, I just think it would be good for them to make explicit in the article what I should do if I think I might want it but want to try it.
rcrowley
All our list prices are monthly and our bills are actually even finer-grained - there's no commitment to pay for a database longer than you run it.
If you do decide to operate on PlanetScale long-term, check out <https://planetscale.com/pricing> for consumption commitment discounting and other options that might make sense for your company.
bekacru
We’ve had early access to it for a while now, we’re already running a lot of performance critical workloads on it and it’s been working wonderfully. Congrats sam and the team on setting a new standard for what highly performant managed Postgres should look like :)
t43562
I don't know why but I can almost never understand American commercial software websites. "what is PlanetScale".....blah, blah blah....WHOOOOSH! No more enlightened than before. Even for products I've worked on - I read the page and can't recognise the thing I'm working on from the description.....
Postgres is involved somehow. I get that.
dfee
i'll take the opposite side. i was very impressed with their website.
the very first line:
> The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases
the second line:
> PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding.
i know exactly what they do. zero fluff. and, i'm now interested.
candiddevmike
Baseless marketing claims aren't considered fluff?
odie5533
How is this different than Aurora Postgres or RDS Postgres?
fastball
The homepage splash of this company is literally a few paragraphs that explain exactly what the company does. The problem might be you.
M4v3R
idk in the linked post it literally says this in the 2nd paragraph:
> Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience.
gpi
But it's done at a scale that's planetscale
didip
If you are on AWS anyway, I am curious why not just use Aurora Postgres?
achristmascarl
I haven't used PlanetScale before, but AWS Aurora limits IOPS and network performance based on your instance size, so you end up in scenarios where you really wish you had more throughput, but sizing up your instance would be a very, very expensive solution
null
yohbho
Did they rename to GA, did a company named GA buy them, or are they general availability, i.e. 1.0 out, or "not closed beta" ?
Ah, overlooked first sentence, read only all headings and navigation and footer:
> is now generally available and out of private preview
awaseem
Might be a dumb question, but what is metal? Are you folks hosting DBs on your own infra or still going through AWS/GCP
mattrobenolt
It's still AWS/GCP, but it uses instance types with local NVMes.
samlambert
hosting on AWS/GCP on the ephemeral NVMe nodes. https://planetscale.com/metal
fourseventy
The way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?
mattrobenolt
We deal with this by always running 3 nodes in a cluster, one per AZ, and strong backup/restore processes.
So yes, the data per-node is ephemeral, but it is redundant and durable for the whole cluster.
alexeldeib
can't speak to GCP specifically but usually the issue is they are host-attached and can't be migrated, so need to be wiped on VM termination or migration -- that's when you lose data.
Reboots typically don't otherwise do anything special unless they also trigger a host migration. GCP live migration has some mention of support though
GCP mentions data persists across reboots here https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd#data_p...
note that stop/terminate via cloud APIs usually releases host capacity for other customers and would trigger data wipe, a guest initiated reboot typically will not.
samlambert
If anyone has questions about our Postgres product please feel free to ask. I will be around to answer.
endorphine
Since NVMe nodes are ephemeral on GCP, would you suggest SaaS with critical customer data to use Metal or persistent disks?
null
the_mitsuhiko
If neki becomes available later, do you expect that customers will be able to easily migrate over to it?
samlambert
we will aim to make it as easy as possible and doable as an online process. with sharding there is always a chance that some application changes are needed so there might be some work required there.
attentionstinks
How should one decide whether to go with MySQL or Postgres for a greenfield project?
add-sub-mul-div
Pre-existing expertise with MySQL and lack of time or inclination to learn something new is the only reason I could think of not to go with Postgres.
tacone
Extensions! Which pg extensions are you going to make available?
dangoodmanUT
Postgres (esoterically?) has some issues with index bloat on high-insert workloads, does PlanetScale do anything special to tune for this by default, since it caters to higher-perf workloads (over something like supabase)?
petergeoghegan
Can you provide more detail/a reference?
I've done extensive work on improving the Postgres B-Tree code, over quite a number of releases. I'm not aware of any problems with high-insert workloads in particular. I have personally fixed a number of subtle issues that could lead to lower space utilization with such workloads [1][2] in the past, though.
if there's a remaining problem in this area, then I'd very much like to know about it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RaATILoiE [2] https://speakerdeck.com/peterg/nbtree-arch-pgcon
samlambert
We don't do anything special (yet) but we do have bloat detection that we warn you about. We've noticed that autovacuum works very well on our Metal product because of the extra resources.
hollylawly
More information about bloat detection here: https://planetscale.com/docs/postgres/monitoring/schema-reco...
dangoodmanUT
On another, similar, vein - i'd be curious to know if XID wraparound and auto vacuum tuning was something you had to advise customers on up front consdering how often that issue rears its head for the same kinds of workloads.
vmg12
How does planetscale for postgres scale? I understand that it's multi node postgres with automatic failover but I think it only really scales for reads and not writes? So is the only way to scale writes horizontally to shard?
samlambert
Kind of. For horizontally scaling writes we are building the Vitess for Postgres which we are calling Neki https://www.neki.dev/
The product we are GA'ing today has the option of PlanetScale Metal which is extremely fast and scales write QPS further than any of the other single-primary Postgres hosts.
vmg12
Thanks for the response, this clarifies things for me because I thought this was already a vitess for postgress implementation. Awesome to hear that this is coming.
fosterfriends
Congrats on the launch Sam! Excited to try it out for Graphite's production DB
Not a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc
Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!