[truetraveller]

The pricing page/docs leaves so many questions unanswered:

-What's the cost of egress?

-What is a read/write exactly? It is a DB "page" read/write? I know there's a section on this, but it doesn't explain details.

-If it's a page read/write, what is the size of the page? 16kb?

-If it's a real row read/write, what is the maximum size? Can I write a 100mb row for the same price?

-What about indexes, or merging the WAL log? Will I be charged for these operations (can result in million+ writes)?

-What about small consecutive writes that fit in a single 16kb page, do I get charged a single write "unit"? RDS actually combines this into a single op (see IOPS with RDS).

-What about cached reads, do I get charged for that?

-What about computationally expensive queries, that do not actually read/write that much?

Please answer these questions. Provide useful real-world pricing examples. This is standard stuff, and especially important if "transparent" pricing is a key feature.

[LewisJEllis]

You come off as quite demanding and expectant for apparently not having read their pricing page or billing docs, which specify very clearly that they're talking about row reads/writes.

They even go into examples with using `EXPLAIN`, `EXPLAIN ANALYZE`, `innodb_rows_read`, etc to see row counts.

https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/billing

[throwusawayus]

Disagree, GP's expectations are perfectly reasonable

Their pricing page starts out by saying "Transparent pricing you can understand"! I shouldn't have to read a several thousand word FAQ, and then still come away wondering if cached pages still count as rows read

Cached page reads are free on Aurora, this makes a huge difference in pricing if it isn't the case on planetscale

[LewisJEllis]

I agree with you that there are some simple questions left unanswered, but "is it row reads?" is not one of them.

[throwusawayus]

The linked blog post literally just says "reads". The word "rows" does not appear in the blog post! You have to click through, yes it's clear once you do, but i'd say it's a valid complaint about the blog post

[LewisJEllis]

The comment by truetraveller is complaining about the pricing and docs, not the blog post:

> The pricing page/docs leaves so many questions unanswered:

The pricing page and docs make "rows" very clear. I was never referring to the blog post, nor was truetraveller.

[truetraveller]

They do not make it clear.

[truetraveller]

I'm not demanding. If "transparent" pricing is a key feature, then please at least provide detailed billing info/examples. From the billing page you linked, still have many questions: If I have a row that's 100mb, is that counted as one read? What about index creation, is that counted? Or, merging the WAL log with the base, is that free? And what is a read "unit"? is this different than a "row read".

[LewisJEllis]

Your comment used to read:

> C'mon guys, this is super basic.

which came off as demanding, until you edited it after my response to instead read "This is standard stuff".

It's bad form to make substantial edits an hour later after you've been replied to, especially if you then refute the reply based in part on that edit.

I agree with you that more examples would be helpful, and you have some good questions which are left unanswered, but "is it rows?" was answered very clearly by the pricing page and billing docs.

[truetraveller]

I edited it because I didn't want to be mean, and I thought that might have been mean. My intention was not to be less "demanding". In fact, I added to more questions to my list with my edit. So, I became even more demanding!

>"is it rows?" was answered very clearly

In the world of DBs, "rows" is extremely vague. We need more info, which is the point of my post.

[ignoramous]

If there's no egress, Planet Scale would make for a pretty neat blob cache store (key -> blob queries) to front S3 for hot objects... 100b reads per month with S3 would cost $40K+ for just GET requests (discounting egress): https://archive.is/4HYH6

[gigatexal]

Maybe the FAQs will go into more detail.

[truetraveller]

They don't!