PlanetScale Scaler Pro

  • I love PlanetScale and if I had one request it would be a plan between Hobby and Scalar (or even a way to combine multiple DBs in 1 plan, and no 2 prod branches won't cut it).

    I have 2 paid Scalar DBs on PlanetScale and I have no intention of moving elsewhere but it does kill me that they both sit almost unused ~10 months out of the year (I have bursty traffic and only during the events, in-person events, that the software is built for). At ~$348/yr per DB it's still a steal compared to managing it all myself but I look at my usage (even during my "busy" months) and I barely make a dent in the usage tier I'm on. In fact I think you could total up my total usage for the lifetime of my account (both DBs) and they wouldn't total up to 1 month of the usage tier.

    Again, I'm not complaining and the cost is manageable but I did create and sell some new software in the last year that I built on DynamoDB (in part to learn, in part due to costs). My software that uses PS is single-tenant so I need 1 per client which is on me, if I was able to rewrite it to be multi-tenant then I'd only have to pay $348 total a year instead of per-client.

    All in all I have had nothing but good experiences with PlanetScale from the product itself to the support staff. I love the migrations and the rollback support, it feels natural when you start using it and dealing with migrations in other DBs feels like a huge pain once you've done it in PlanetScale.

  • I kind of have a thing for DBaaS pricing, and that table with the comparison with RDS looked suspicious to me because it doesn't specify the exact instance type used on the AWS side. ~~I think it should be `db.r6g.xlarge` because it has 4 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM. That is $0.43/h, so $0.43 * 730 = $313 / month. They have one primary and 2 replicas, so 313 x 3 = $940. It doesn't quite fit, so maybe that's not the instance type they chose, but indeed it seems cheaper.~~ But that doesn't take into account reserved instances, which can lower the price on the RDS side.

    Edit: Looking again, I think the instance used for comparison is `db.r6gd.xlarge` from the Multi AZ-deployments (two standbys) list. That is $1.445/h, so $1054 / month. The difference could be for storage and I/O.

    However, the PS Scaler Pro is $1.5 / GB, which is quite a lot. General purpose storage in AWS is only $0.115. The comparison table uses 10 GB only, but if the DB size is 1 TB, then RDS would be a lot cheaper?

    Please correct me if I got something wrong, I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing.

  • Am I missing something in the pricing or is the Storage costs very unappealing. For anything with a usage skewed towards high ratio of storage to usage, the costs aren't competitive.

    2.5$ per GB in "Scalar" and 1.5$ per GB in "Scalar PRO" compared to 0.11$ RDS for General purpose (or 0.125$ for provisioned + the IOPS you use, double that for multi-az), Supabase at 0.125$, Firebase at 0.1725$,DynamoDB at 0.25$, MongoDB Atlas serverless at 0.25$, cockroachDB serverless at 0.5$ per GB, FaunaDB at 1$ per GB. (Neon says it's 0.000164 per GiB, but somethings seems off, it's not at the same scale, so I'm guessing there's a catch here)

  • Excited to see this finally rolled out. Now just waiting on the foreign key constraint support.

  • It's great MySQL is still getting some love. I have no complaints with it.

  • What is the expected performance? If I have a very simple table with 100k records, what will be the expected read/write/update tps? I know it depends on many things, but still any guesses?

  • Tl;dr: This new plan basically fix the number one complain about PlanetScale and offers Unlimited row reads and writes.

  • The only thing stopping me from using this is the lack of foreign keys. Is that ever coming?

  • Would be nice for the first table to have the pricing, and a comparison with the old plan as well...

  • love PlanetScale product. Do you recommend any similar offering for PostgresSQL?

  • The last time I recommended to use planetscale at my company the only factor that stopped us using them was GDPR/DSGVO. Any news about a europe friendly version?