PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases
75 comments
·October 30, 2025outlore
impulser_
Yeah, and they became an actual profitable tech company which is extremely rare today.
gdulli
Sounds horrible. Trying to think of another tech company that scaled down a free offering or laid off staff. Coming up empty.
samlambert
I 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.
andreybaskov
I'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
didn't help that they called it "Free forever" before taking it away. Lesson learned
ksec
I only remember it was called "Hobby" Plan.
andreybaskov
understandable, but again, "forever" as in heat death of the universe? Sadly there is no such thing as forever either.
radicalriddler
I notice that PlanetScale has a Developer Educator position available. Has anyone sent that to Aaron Francis yet? He might be interested.
jorisnoo
I'm not sure returning to his previous job is his top priority right now.
ianhawes
Imagine laying off one of the most genuine, friendly developer evangelists of all time.
saxenaabhi
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-...
samlambert
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
@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
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.
radicalriddler
This 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.
Animats
Most 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.
timenotwasted
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.
khamidou
btw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.
nl
I 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
Sounds 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.
Nathanba
Sadly 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
This 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.
lateforwork
Databricks 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
rileymichael
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..
amluto
And 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.
blorenz
Should 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
Really 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.
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...