Planetscale Offering $5 Databases
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PlanetScale announces a $5 database offering, sparking debate among HN users about the company's pricing strategy and reliability.
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Oct 30, 2025 at 11:20 AM EDT
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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.
(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
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
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
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.
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.
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
Also what was capitalism again?
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
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.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
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.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?
I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.
Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.
Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".
Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result?
Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs.
FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.
Rug-pulls. Not even once.
For others, I wrote a longer response above!
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!
PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
Says "free forever"
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
It's not hard to imagine that not every word ever written about a product tier was remembered by the CEO.
This is the bloody pricing page. If I as the CEO of a SaaS startup don't even know what our pricing page says I should step down. That's our offer, that's the most important page we have. Come on now. Writing "free forever" isn't something some rogue marketing intern does, this is a core positioning decision and something you'd absolutely be part of, if not leading, as the founder.
> We’ve chosen to build a company that can last forever. This is why I have made the decision to prioritize profitability for PlanetScale. https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever
> Hobby
> Free forever for hobby use
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.
Absolutely wild to me that you talk to peers like children.
Nobody owes you anything. It’s all best effort.
In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.
And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.
Maybe we shouldn't have been so accepting of long lists of asterisks/footnotes in ads or ToCs that invalidate much of the promotional material?
Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.
But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.
It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"
Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)
If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.
I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
He posted this:
"I would like to thank the haters for helping me promote the new PlanetScale $5 plan all day. Thanks guys."
Scorching his reputation on Hacker News is a real 400 IQ movie for a cloud database company CEO.
[1] https://neon.com
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
It sure does scale to zero alright...
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
and Sam's response
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
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.
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