[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

https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever

[rimprobablyly]

> famously?

Notoriously

[diordiderot]

Could you explain?

[rimprobablyly]

Look up the definition of famous and notorious. What needs explaining?

[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

[ndriscoll]

> Businesses that need to haul ass

> Benchmarks are done on a dual-core VM with "unlimited" IOPS

I'd be interested in a comparison with a pair of Beelink SER5 Pros ($300 each) in master-slave config.

[parthdesai]

> > Benchmarks are done on a dual-core VM with "unlimited" IOPS

Unlimited is a feature here, no need to be snarky. They famously went against the accepted practice of separating storage from compute, and as a result, you reduce latency by an order of magnitude and get unlimited IOPS.

[ndriscoll]

You do not get unlimited IOPS with any technology, but you especially do not get it in AWS, where the machines seem to be? Writing "unlimited" is completely unserious. If it's 67k read/33k write at 4k qd32 or something just say so. Or if you're actually getting full bandwidth to a disk with a 2 core VM (doubt), say 1.5M or whatever.

[maxenglander]

In addition to the point about performance Sam made, PlanetScale's Vitess (MySQL) offers out-of-the-box horizontal scalability, which means we can maintain extremely good performance as your dataset and QPS grows to a massive scale: https://planetscale.com/case-studies/cash-app. We will be bringing the same capability to Postgres later on.

Our uptime and reliability is also higher than what you might find elsewhere. It's not uncommon for companies paying lots of money to operate elsewhere to migrate to PlanetScale for that reason.

We're a serious database for serious businesses. If a business can't afford to spend $39/mo to try PlanetScale, they may be happier operating elsewhere until their business grows to a point where they are running into scaling and performance limits and can afford (or badly need, depending on the severity of those limits) to try us out.

[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.

[dangoodmanUT]

They try it by contacting sales and setting up a pilot, not a self-service free trial

[stronglikedan]

> but it's common to offer some trial period to new users

That is rather uncommon for B2B.